Our CEO muses…

Travelling to City Airport in the early hours today, watching the city of London waking up, embarking on another trip to mainland Europe, my thoughts are moving to and from work and life issues (from the dear people who are no longer waking up here with us, to the hardship of breaking down organisational silos, to how wasteful it is when a short life is spent on surviving wars).

I was probably associating also to a conversation I had yesterday with a potential therapy client, Polish German by background, who asked me what it would be like for me to work with him. I said that life had taught me not to make assumptions… and then this morning I was recalling how, when I was a child in the 80s, we needed a visa to visit Spain… and then I was thinking of a colleague on his way home from the group relations conference about atrocities in Europe, … and about Brussels.

The joy of moving across Europe freely (our younger generation at the Tavistock Institute and our children know no other way) is, of course as we oldies know, a first in the history of this bloodshed continent. Despite the threats that come with breaking down some barriers, the beauty is in the complexity of the mix- both different and part of a diversified whole at the same time.

So this is to say how important the unified Europe is to me, to all of us. To struggle from within with integration and collaboration is time consuming and often painful. To split takes little time, sometimes no time at all. The impact though is disastrous for generations.

Eliat Aram
CEO, The Tavistock Institute