The Book

DOUBLE LIVES dives into the inner processes that allow us to withstand whatever we have lived with in our childhood/formative years. Those are the years in human development when our vulnerability and lack of full growth mean that we internalize whatever we are living with in our familial and community constellations.

The early chapters, thoroughly detail how each of our survival processes loop into each other to build a fortifying wall that allows us to survive and make it to adulthood. The consequence, however, is a detachment from our true selves - we identify with what we lived with rather than with who we actually are born to be. This compromises our vitality and our full cognitive capacity.

Interspersing real-life case studies and references, I examine and explicate the underlay of eating disorders, depression, anxiety, self-harm, addiction, loneliness, workaholism, and scripted lives. In the riveting chapter 6, some of the pernicious effects of ubiquitous societal gaslighting and propagation of misleading or false aphorisms are exposed.

Then comes the logical segue to how all these internalizations also beset the leaders and decision-makers throughout society which then brings about the inconsistencies and blind-spots and wrong-headed directions that so often occur. Our ability to go to Mars should make is wonder why we are so helpless to address homelessness.

Those thought-inducing chapters then lead into a corresponding presentation of what our true self means and how to live it. In this regard, key distinctions are drawn between destinational and directional paradigms. The final chapters uplift and illuminate what is possible for all of us on based simply on being born.

DOUBLE LIVES - Why Everything Is The Way It Is engenders clarity, motivation, and direction towards living a life of fullness, joy, and curiosity - precisely what our true selves are waiting for. It is a book of wondering and liberation.

The Author

CALVIN WHITE has a Masters degree in counseling psychology and a Bachelors degree in history.

For the past 30 years he has worked as a high school counselor and mental health counselor. A prolific essayist, he has had over 130 essays in all of Canada's major newspapers on a range of topics: politics, education, sports, psychology, the Dalai Lama, addiction, Indigenous issues, kindness, and especially kids.

He has travelled extensively. In 2010, he worked for Medecins Sans Frontieres as a mental health specialist in central Asia during an MDR-TB epidemic.

A published poet of 3 books and scores of poems in literary journals, two of his non-fiction books have been published, the last - LETTERS FROM THE LAND OF FEAR in 2015 by Guernica Editions.

He is currently seeking a publisher for his latest book - DOUBLE LIVES-Why Everything Is The Way It Is.

I will stop at the last corner on the road

And wait there

Sit down in the dirt of boredom

The crumbly earth of pain

Where the muck forms so easily

After mere minutes of rain

Stretch out my legs

Even lie flat with back nestled

Or curled for comfort

Inviting the long stay

Waiting there

Despite any objection or propulsion otherwise

Maybe to see others there too

Unnoticed all these years

Others waiting for me

Or simply waiting like me

Having seen too well

The deep dexterity of beauty
Calvin White

we use speed to get across thin ice to avoid falling through

so too do we speed through our lives constantly flicking from

one thought, one worry, one project, one activity, one fantasy,

one duty to another.

we then plan bucket lists as though what we can do and get done

is what life is all about.

slowing down is sooooo difficult

slow means we might feel or see too much

it means the ice might break
(N. Arguelo - from INTERFACE)

Already published books

Ferlinghetti of the Shuswap

From a small town in the mountains of British Columbia, White actively seeks to connect with a vast world of people and their anguish, and the human touch that might heal it....The shape of White’s poems, and his gaze on the world, are just as deliberate. There is great beauty here.
BC Review

Philosophically minded wanderer

Throughout, White remains quietly affecting. An elegant portrayer of moments and scenes that, the book suggests over and again, will be lost as time passes and the globe withers, the poet seizes our hearts as he compels us to see through his eyes.
Vancouver Sun