Sublime

Rule No. 3: Write what you know. Bellow once said, “Fiction is the higher autobiography.”

Oprah Winfrey, an undeniably successful guide to millions, once explained the three things every human being wants most are to be seen, heard, and understood.

I should probably clarify that I have yet to attain perfection in any of these attitudes; I wrote this book for myself, as much as for anyone else, putting my faith in the words of the author Richard Bach: ‘You teach best what you most need to learn.’

To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

Growing up – and the lesson of the ‘good-enough’ parent – is in part a process of learning that our own desires are not the centre of anyone else’s world. We can be needy and manipulative, bullying or seducing others into pandering to us, but we should expect to be resented for it. Where our behaviour is positive and less self-centred, though, some

“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up,” Herzen says. “But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment … Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.”