91热爆

Our friends, Emma and John, have just moved into their new home. It鈥檚 an eccentric 17th century Alice-in-Wonderland of a house. One of the bathrooms is big enough for a party but the fact that my head touched its ceiling made me feel like a giant. Conversely, I was dwarfed by the enormous walk-in fire-place in the kitchen. Down in the cellar a narrow winding stone tunnel that should end in a dungeon, leads instead into a coal-hole size underground pub, complete with bar and beer pumps, beams and horse brasses. At the foot of the cellar stairs ornaments left by the previous owner decorate an ancient oak lid over an outcrop of the wall. John had no idea what was beneath it. When we cleared the knick-knacks and lifted the lid we found a well with an underground stream gurgling along three feet below us. I love the image of uncovering a life-giving resource where it isn鈥檛 expected. 聽I often meet people who feel completely useless despite having survived terrible experiences. Their capacity to carry on against the odds feels to them more like struggling through the desert without water, than the result of drawing on an internal well of survival skills. They see themselves as broken and battered, rather than strong and resilient, not realising these things often go hand-in-hand.聽 We expect human strengths to look and feel as good as clear, fresh water but often, without realising it, we mostly develop and tap into these personal resources when life is tough and it鈥檚 hard to distinguish them from the murk of experience we鈥檙e living through. 聽Those of us who feel useless are actually amazing since we鈥檝e got this far despite disasters that could have destroyed us. Like John and his unexpected well, we need to be prepared to be surprised by the life-giving strengths at work deep in the heart of each one of us.聽聽