Sunday Blog 198 – 17th August 2025
This week I’ve been to Melbourne for a two-day meeting which I had intrepidly volunteered to co-chair, then I played catch-up with other work and volunteering commitments and worked on my final assignment for my first unit of a creative writing graduate certificate. As I’ve been focusing on script writing assignments, I’ve tried not to let my book project get too far behind. I’ve multi-tasked by working on scenes from the book, transforming them into stage versions.
Today I took time with my sisters to mark the nearly one year deathiversary of our beloved Mum. We can’t be together on the actual day, so we got together beforehand.
The combination of the melancholy – Mum’s been gone for nearly a year now – and the subject of my book is all about recovery from a single incident trauma – and the Melbourne meeting was related activism I haven’t delved into for a while – must have made this podcast episode jump out at me. The Uses of Adversity, featuring Martha Beck.
She described the analogy of pain, of sorrow, something we want to stop feeling as soon as possible – like an unripe fruit. But if we can sit with these uncomfortable feelings, they can soften, ripen and sweeten. Anger can become clear seeing. Fear can become courage. Sorrow can become compassion.
That’s what I needed to hear today. And if you needed to hear it too, here you are.