I couldn’t resist. I was determined to work that morning. By about 9:30 in the morning, the various participants started to gather outside my office near the Courthouse Professional Building.

And when the band began to play, I had to get out and see the parade.

I watched the people watching the parade. Perhaps someone was watching me watching the people watch the parade. And probably most of that wasn’t happening at all. But we like to look and sometimes to be seen.

There’s more than one parade going on. Suppose the parade stopped, and all the people on the sidewalk walked by while those in the parade watched. What would they see?

Why do we like a parade?

For various reasons:  I like to see the generations pass by, the children especially. So many different kinds of scouts, boy and girl scouts. Maybe they really are “scouts,” leading us into the future. Somewhere in the Old Testament it says, “And a little child shall lead them.”

The children line the streets as well, pushing closest to the parade, fighting for the candy thrown toward them. I wonder when some person will throw our children something healthy, not dairy based. Children eat what we give them. Imagine children being thrown healthy foods that harm neither animals nor our planet, and they are scrambling for that food as well. But, as they say, I digress.
There are also displays of power in the parade, the diesel engines, various souped-up cars, trucks, and the politicians looking all friendly and bestowing smile upon smile on the crowd, pocketing as many votes as possible.

There are so many costumes. It’s fun to be someone else for a while, especially when we shake up the usual. We all have our hidden selves. Our society may not give us much opportunity to display them in our lives. Putting on a mask, once in a while, reminds us of that.

One way Jung described these different masks we wear in public is calling it our persona, the roles we play in society. Those roles may protect our subjectivity in certain public situation, masking what we chose to share with a few others..

Of course, we also enhance our being, displaying beauty, the parade of flowers, the young person riding demurely in an open convertible, waving, hoping to be a chosen one, someone special for at least a moment.

Where does such a parade end? Where does it begin? Does it really begin near my office, next to the courthouse? Does it really end at Sunset Park?

I remember once dreaming I would be in a parade of images. There’s an inner parade that goes on as well. It happens every night, during the day as well, our night dream, day dreams, all on a continuum of the more than rational. Countless people, situations, plots, the strange and the unusual pass before us. We participate and we observe, “participant observers” as the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan would say of the analyst or psychotherapist.

Analytical work is an attempt to take that parade of images seriously, as potentially life changing. Within ourselves, in the depths of our being, each day and night, without end, images of power, beauty, perhaps embodied in the image of a child, as our inner potential continue to parade before our consciousness saying, “There is more, yet to be discovered.”

To become conscious of this parade is to experience new possibilities for our lives. Together in the therapeutic setting we explore what yet could be as we attend to what occurs on the margins of our awareness.

After the parade in town, I went back to my office. Once again, I wrote my dreams down in my journal allowing the images to begin their effects on me. With gratitude, I celebrated this gift of an endless parade of images.