Being a novice is safe. When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more. Being an expert opens you up to judgement.

what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to ‘tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment’.

I know now that I’m not trusting anyone or anything any more. And that it is hard to live for long periods without trusting anyone or anything. It’s like living without sleep; eventually it will kill you.

The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane.

Underlying the whole long affair was a deep repetition compulsion, the term Freud used to describe the need to re-enact painful experiences in order to master them.

Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try. ‘Imagine,’ I said, back then, to some friends, in an earnest attempt to explain, ‘imagine

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though

We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost.

Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how.