Any Ordinary Day Quotes

“Ultimately, counselling is an act of hope. It’s the hope that something might get better, and for that to happen, it requires something to change.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“The question of life being fair or unfair is one of the first things to drop away once you truly understand that you're as vulnerable as the next person to life's vagaries.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“To spur growth, it must be seismic; it must shake you to your core and cause you to fundamentally rethink everything you believe. The higher the level of stress caused by the event, the greater the potential for change.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“One of the hardest things is that life keeps relentlessly rolling on, like the ocean, the tides keep rising and falling, the waves breaking and retreating. Everybody returns to their regular routine and there's an expectation that the bereaved person will start the process of recovery. This is very difficult to do because for a grieving person the most ordinary activities can take on deep meaning that would never cross anybody else's mind.

Hannah says “I remember being in the supermarket and someone bumping into me. It was the first time I'd been to the supermarket since Matt had died, probably only two weeks after. I was walking around with the trolley and you're confronted by all the things you don't need to buy anymore. Matt used to have gluten free bread for example. I thought 'well I don’t need to buy that anymore’. It's the most mundane detail but it kills you inside. And someone bumped into me and didn't say sorry. I didn't do anything but I just wanted to turn around and go ‘you don't know what's happened to me! I'm grieving!' It can be the tiniest thing that wounds you.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“We've taken it away too much, the funeral people take over. No. Let people bury their own." "Do you think it helps people to go through the process and be intimately involved?" "Yes of course, of course!" It's the most emphatic Steve has been about anything. "Keep the body at home, put it on the dining table, let the kids sleep under the table, paint the coffin, decorate it, eat. When my brother died we had fights over the coffin drinking whiskey. I remember one brother pounding Bill's coffin 'Oh you bastard!' It was our lives. We carried the coffin, we filled in the hole. I used to work in the garden as a boy with my father. And I dug the hole to put his plants in and filled in the hole. In the end we put Dad into the ground and I helped my brothers fill in the hole. We need to do it ourselves." "Why do you think it helps to have that involvement?" "It's our responsibility, it's not to help, it's enabling us to grieve, it's enabling us to go through it together. Otherwise it's taken away and whoosh - it's gone. And you can't grieve. You've got to feel, you've got to touch, you've got to be there."

Steve is passionate. He reaches into his bag to pull out something to show me. It's an old yellowing newspaper clipping. The caption reads 'Devastation: a woman in despair at the site of the blasts near the Turkey-Syrian border'. The photograph is a woman, she has her arms open to the sky and she is wailing, her head thrown back. "I pray in front of that" Steve tells me as I look at it. "That's a wonderful photo of the pain of our world. I don't know if she's lost relatives or what's blown up. You have a substance to your life if you've felt pain, you've got understanding, that's where compassion is, it makes you a deeper richer human being.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“You see Leigh, Steve says, I was ordained for this. I'm not working, I'm not acting, I'm just myself. I'm not acting the Shepard, I am the Shepard. That's what ordination is.

I believe when I go into a situation, others know that because I'm a priest, God is with them; they're not abandoned. Their suffering is their entrance into His suffering and resurrection.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“That in pain, there’s also joy. You can’t be in the presence of just one thought, that life is good, or life is bad, or life is sad. There’s all these things. And there are so many good people in the world, actually, so much kindness. It’s everywhere.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“You have a substance to your life if you’ve felt pain. You’ve got understanding, that’s where compassion is. It makes you a deeper, richer human being.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“It was as if the universe had orchestrated their best selves to meet at exactly the right time.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“I felt this lightness settling on me, which was new. It's not closure, because I will live with Matt's death and the pain of it every day and the grief will stay with me. I just felt that I was carrying it differently. It was a place inside me that was more contained, it wasn't all of me. It wasn't like raw, open grief. It was almost like the scab had grown over. Occasionally you pick at it, or it might come off when you're not expecting it and you start bleeding again.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“Stuart Diver has had years of extensive professional counselling to retrain his brain so that he can replace the thought of how helpless he was when Sally dies with the truth that he tried everything he could to save her, showing how much he cared. He has learned to substitute memories of Sally's last moments with thoughts of wonderful times from their lives together- a great trip, a fun birthday, some other special occasion.
In the corner of his living room is a bicycle that he rides every night, and he likens keeping his mental health on track to keeping physically fit. It's hard. It requires patience and it takes discipline.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“It was a bit scary to see him, but not him. He was like a sort of Madame Tussaud's model; he didn't have much hair, he had a very shaved head so you could see the stitches, they had washed him and then put him in a hospital gown. It was when I took hold of his hand, there was sand in his palms still. I felt - it's you.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“I wish everybody was just taught to say 'I'm really sorry to hear about your dead wife', because often people would say things like they didn't want to bring it up because 'I didn't want to remind you of it' and you'd think "Oh yeah, I would have forgotten all about it".”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“. Their normal is shattered. I tried to talk to people about, “This is your new normal. We’ve got to find a way of making life with this new set of circumstances.” You can’t get them back their old life,’ he says.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“I’ve realised that by far the most valuable friends are the kind ones. They may not be the most sparkling guests at the dinner table or the most memorable makers of wedding speeches. But my god, they are the ones you want to sit with you at the worst of times. They are the ones who know the right things to say and do, because their hearts are empathetic. I’ve come to believe that amongst all the good human qualities, there is none greater than kindness.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“time doesn’t heal all wounds, but it does give the tools to endure them.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“Traditionally, psychologists have studied the negative impacts of trauma and bereavement, the ways in which people are left broken and troubled, and the focus has been on how to return to so-called ‘normal’ functioning. In the past three decades, though, researchers have asked, What if people don’t return to normal, what if they develop enhanced functioning instead? The term ‘posttraumatic growth’ was coined by two American academics, Lawrence Calhoun and Richard Tedeschi, who defined it as the aspects of positive, personal change a person may experience alongside intense suffering after a major life trauma.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“Schemas, whether you’re aware of yours or not, powerfully influence your thoughts, actions and behaviour. They’re the filter through which you interpret other people’s behaviour and they help you decide how to act with friends and strangers. They also help you anticipate and plan for the future, and they even govern what you notice and what you remember when new information comes along. We all pay more attention to things that reinforce our schemas and downplay or negate incoming data that conflicts with them – something known as confirmation bias.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“it’s a fantasy to imagine we have any control or any magical protection from bad things happening to us.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“By his tradition, Michael means his Christian faith. I try hard to set aside my judgement about religion when we talk. For some reason, anytime somebody tells me the way they cope hard times is by trusting that God is in control, I want to follow up "Well that's what you're supposed to say but what do you really think?". But again I try to ignore my skepticism and listen properly. Michael Spence is an extremely intelligent, accomplished, insightful person. If he finds value in Christianity then surely there are lessons for me to draw from that.

"I don't want any of my questions to sound judgemental, I just want to understand" I say. "It's okay, ask what you want" he encourages me. "Do you literally believe that God exists?" I ask. "I literally believe that God exists" he replies. "Your question is really, why do I have a faith? And the answer is external and internal. External, because to me the Christian account of the world makes more sense than any other account of the world and I suppose internal, because it is true to my lived experience. It makes sense of the world to me, not only in the matter of theory but also as a matter of my heart and spirit.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“One of the strengths of my tradition is the notion that the world is pretty broken. A lot of the time, life is just hard. And even for people who have a relatively benign life, for a lot of the time, stuff's just hard. And it’s okay to say stuff’s hard, it doesn’t do anyone dishonour. It’s alright. It’s just giving people space to be human.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“I think what I want to say in your book is that the bad things are hard but sometimes, the good things are hard too, Michael says. For me it's a really important point that life can be hard in its evidently hard moments but even things that are really good and really worth doing, and I love my wife to bits, and she me, and we have a strong marriage - they can be hard too.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“A lot of the time, life is just hard, and even for people who have a relatively benign life, for a lot of the time, stuff’s just hard. And it’s okay to say stuff’s hard, it doesn’t do anyone dishonour. It’s alright. It’s just giving people space to be human.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“I think what I want to say in your book is that the bad things are hard but sometimes the good things are hard too,’ Michael says. ‘For me, it’s a really important point, that life can be hard in its evidently hard moments, but even things that are really good and really worth doing – and I love my wife to bits, and she me, and we have a strong marriage – they can be hard too.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day