THE SHOCK OF LIFE

We reach for distraction when we’re anxious, afraid of our thoughts, and what they might tell us about death, sex or our own violence.

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(At the bottom, some answers to your questions)

I am wheeling down to the café on Brook Green with an ex-student who begins to talk about a theory of ‘transformative experience’, which I understand to be experiences that switch you from one way of seeing to another, where you cannot, intellectually or emotionally, return to a previous state. The way you see the world will be utterly different to how it was before.

No one can avoid transformative experiences, either elective – new kinds of life-changing relationships, for example - or accidental. In Shattered, I described being on a ward – in what I called The Hospital of Accidents - with about twenty people, all of whom had life-changing catastrophes; motorcycle accidents, falls, rock-climbing mishaps. And so on.

As you might have seen from my last blog, where I take some steps up and down my living room with the help of three physiotherapists, my life has been transformed by what happened to me that day in Isabella’s apartment two years ago. I have been forced to live in an entirely new way, and I don’t like it; I hate every moment of it. But I have to put up with it.

What can you make of what has happened to you? How can you absorb or assimilate it?