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As a journalist, Leigh Sales often encounters people experiencing the worst moments of their lives in the full glare of the media. But one particular string of bad news stories - and a terrifying brush with her own mortality - sent her looking for answers about how vulnerable each of us is to a life-changing event. What are our chances of actually experiencing one? What do we fear most and why? And when the worst does happen, what comes next? In this wise and layered book, Leigh talks intimately with people who've faced the unimaginable, from terrorism to natural disaster to simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Expecting broken lives, she instead finds strength, hope, even humour. Leigh brilliantly condenses the cutting-edge research on the way the human brain processes fear and grief, and poses the questions we too often ignore out of awkwardness. Along the way, she offers an unguarded account of her own challenges and what she's learned about coping with life's unexpected blows. Warm, candid and empathetic, this book is about what happens when ordinary people, on ordinary days, are forced to suddenly find the resilience most of us don't know we have.… (more)
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Sales is more journalistic than literary. She
In ‘Any Ordinary Day’ she takes us to meet a number of people who have been greatly affected by traumatic incidents. For some it is the sudden death of a loved one, for others a miraculous escape, and in some cases, both. She also speaks with some people whose job it is to offer support to people as they come through their trauma. There’s the Jesuit priest, for example, who teaches Sales to “accompany” the person. It’s not so important to say the right thing, apparently, but simply to be there. But the one who really struck me was the ‘Forensic Counsellor’, whose job it is take family into the morgue for a viewing of their loved one’s body. The process she works through, what she says and explains, and how she assists during the viewing I found to be profoundly moving. I just hope I never have to meet her professionally.
Life is random. Things happen. Sometimes, really bad things happen and there’s nothing one can do about it. It’s not punishment, and often can’t even be rationally explained; it just happens. How one manages life’s surprises (good and bad), and the horrific difficulties that are thrown at one, determines, perhaps, the direction of life post the trauma. Until the next one.
‘Any Ordinary Day’ is a surprisingly uplifting book, considering the despair that Sales’ subjects have been through.
“If you had asked me before… which of my friends were my favourites, I would have said the funny, charismatic ones: the ones who take