Living with What We Must

What continues to matter when nothing can be fixed?

Living with What We Must: The Persistence of What Matters is a developing book project with philosopher Niall Keane. It grows directly from questions that emerged while writing Entwined Selves.

Across psychotherapy, healthcare, organisational life and ordinary human experience, we encounter situations in which improvement, resolution and influence cannot be assumed. Yet the disappearance of our ability to change an outcome does not necessarily bring an end to care, responsibility or concern. People remain alongside those they cannot cure, honour commitments whose outcomes they cannot secure, and continue to care where nothing can be repaired.

The project asks what these situations reveal about what matters. It explores care, responsibility, fidelity, grief, remembrance and witness not primarily in terms of what they achieve, but as ways in which significance persists when familiar expectations of progress and resolution fall away.

Rather than offering another method for managing difficult circumstances, the project asks a more fundamental question: how do we live with what we must?