Monthly Archive: October 2020

I’ve having some vivid dreams at the moment. Last Sunday I dreamt I was pushing open the heavy door to a train station, when coming through the door the other way was someone I used to know.  As we passed each other, I said to her “it’s really all about resilience you know.  That’s the key to it all”.  Then I woke up. Since then I’ve been thinking about resilience a lot. Events of the last few days have caused me to think about resilience even more.   I know the word resilience is getting bandied about more at the moment because of the pandemic but for many of us, it’s something we’ve been living with for years. In the last few days...

A woman approached me at a local event 3 years after Nico died.  She was someone who had pointedly avoided me immediately after Nico died, crossing the road and concentrating on the contents of her bag with such intensity I thought she’d spotted a winning lottery ticket in there.  She may have been planning to give me some kind of explanation and apology but I’ll never know as she actually said was: “I didn’t speak to you when Nico died because I didn’t know what to say”.  Having delivered this line, she looked so smug and pleased with herself, so “well, that box is ticked” and all very like “I’ve just donated to Children in Need”, that I just wasn’t able to...

When I was a child my mother told me the mark of maturity is understanding when, how and why you need to say sorry.   She said it was important to know when you were wrong and that you should never be afraid to be wrong, so long as you also weren’t afraid to admit it.   She said sorry was important. She believed a true apology took three steps.  Step one was to admit to the person involved that you were wrong.  Step two was to actually apologise – but she said the apology only worked if you really understood why you were apologising and what you were apologising for.  The third step was to offer to make amends in a real and...