Stepping back is not easy, but it is always illuminating. In his essay ‘My Own Life’, written when he knew he was dying, the great medical writer Dr Oliver Sacks describes becoming able to see his life ‘as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts’. He goes on to say that he feels ‘a sudden clear focus and perspective’. This is the great gift that rewards stepping back – to look anew at what feels familiar and already thoroughly known.
