Mindfulness – Page 2 – Kitty Wheater

Skin Hunger

This piece was first posted on For Times Like These: Blogs from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy to help us through COVID19 lockdowns and meltdowns, and to raise our spirits.

‘Skin hunger is the biological need for human touch,’ writes Sirin Kale for Wired. ‘It’s why babies in neonatal intensive care units are placed on their parent’s naked chests. It’s the reason that prisoners in solitary confinement often report craving human contact as ferociously as they desire their liberty.’

It’s also why, three months into lockdown, many of us may feel increasingly tearful, low, or flat. Perhaps you live alone, or you may live in that kind of respectful but distant adult co-habitation, with flatmates or family, where you are physically adjacent but never touch. You may be sharing a house with people you don’t like that much. And even if you are living with people you love, and with whom you are physically affectionate, life may simply be so tough right now that your need for connection and comfort feels ravenous. There is a reason why many of us say, after a long day, ‘can I have a hug?’

Yet if you work for the NHS, live with an NHS worker, or even if someone in your household has just popped out to the shops, it feels as though touch must be curated and planned for. After your shower, after you’ve washed your hands, after you’ve washed the milk cartons in soapy water in the kitchen sink. Did you touch the door handle again when you went to the post? It’s not exactly an auspicious climate for all the casual small comforts of other people’s presence: the hand on the shoulder, or back, or arm.

At this time, when we must be so vigilant about touch, you may spot various signs in mind and body that your system is craving it. Like Alice, a young Londoner in Kale’s article, you may notice after a hug that “You just get that rush of feeling better…like it’s all okay.” You may miss friends or family so much that it actually hurts – which it does. You may be hankering after a former pet, or the dog you used to walk before lockdown (how I miss Ben the collie, and his silky ears).

You may start to notice other ways in which the body is seeking out contact, too. When you skip your daily walk and feel grumpy afterwards, it’s not just that your body is missing its cardiovascular release, your mind its hit of green. “Simply walking around your room stimulates the pressure receptors in your feet,” says Tiffany Field, of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami. When you collapse onto the couch at the end of the day, your body wants to be held up. Every teenager’s default lounging position, remember, is full-length on the floor.

So how might we respond kindly to our need for touch during this time? Here are some things that might help.

1. Reach out to those around you

When mood is slipping, we often start to withdraw. You may notice that you have stopped being affectionate with your family; alternatively you may find, when someone hugs you, that you inexplicably become tearful. Both of these are very normal. See what it’s like to begin to reach out again: a hand on your mum’s arm when she has brought you a cup of tea, a hug from a flatmate you trust. Be gentle with yourself, start small, and see what happens.

Sometimes, reaching out begins with a conversation. You may even notice, if all your interactions are online at the moment, that a friend tells you after a good chat ‘I wish I could give you a hug.’ The mind may well prompt melancholy at this thought – ‘but he can’t!’ And yet: see if it’s possible to pause, and take in your friend’s well-wishing. Notice what happens in the body, and know that that hug will come, in good time.

Meanwhile, if you have a dog as lovely as Ben the collie, stroke the dog. “Having pets is wonderful,’ says Field. “When you pet a dog, you’re also moving your own skin and experiencing pressure stimulation.” Give yourself permission to spend time with your pet, as near or far as suits you both.

2. Feel your feet

You may live alone, or feel so flat and tired that reaching out to those you live with feels like too much effort. Movement that affects the receptors in the soles of the feet can be very grounding, and in turn, energising.

So walk, if you like to walk. There’s some great guidance here on mindful walking from Andy Puddicombe, founder of Headspace. Many of us will want to walk outside at this time of year, but walking inside if you can’t go out, picking a short path that you can traverse up and down, can be surprisingly calming. Notice your feet as you walk: if we are anxious, we may find that we are walking on the balls of the feet, almost bouncing. If we are low, it may be all that we can do to put one foot in front of the other. Allow your feet to sense the ground, holding you up.

Or shut the door, draw the curtains, put on some music, and dance in your socks. Feel the floor underneath your feet. If you’re stuck for knowing what to listen to, try the recommendations at the bottom of this blog, by University Chaplain Harriet Harris. If you’re stuck for knowing how to dance, don’t worry about that, and go with it: the body knows what it needs.

3. Seek out quiet comfort

If you have small children climbing all over you every minute of the day, you may feel ‘touched out’. Likewise, if you are feeling introverted, or that kind of exhausted-on-a-cellular-level that is perilously close to burnout, you may need quieter forms of sensory comfort.

So try your favourite blanket wrapped round you, tucked up on the couch. Gardening, and the soil under your fingers. Lying in the sun in a park for half an hour, feeling the grass beneath you. The weight of a really good hardback in your hands. A fresh pillow-case on your pillow tonight. Fields suggests, ‘‘give yourself a scalp massage, or rub moisturiser into your face.” And don’t under-estimate the power of giving yourself a hug; yes, literally.

You may like to do a body scan for your mindfulness practice this week, especially sensing the contact that the body makes with the floor, the mat, or the bed.

‘Skin hunger’ is a great phrase, because it reminds us that nourishing our senses is a key part of nourishing our minds at the moment. It needn’t take much; sometimes a well-timed walk is all that’s needed to turn a day around. But on the other hand, it could be something to choose ‘skin food’ regularly, little and often, asking yourself what might help – and sometimes being a bit brave, and turning the music up louder, just so you can lie on the floor like a teenager, and really enjoy it.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Tiny Beautiful Wild Things

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy.

In 1995, the writer Cheryl Strayed hiked a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, aged twenty-six, alone. Four years earlier, Strayed’s mother had died of cancer at forty-five, just seven weeks after her diagnosis. The young woman’s life, marriage, and family fell apart in the wake of her sudden loss, and she became embroiled in heroin.

When Strayed decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, she did it – she said – in the hope that it would be her way back to being the woman her mother had raised her to be, rather than the woman she had become. And so she walked a thousand miles across the deserts and mountains of California and the forests of Oregon, past rattlesnakes and bears and cougar scat. In the desert, she rubbed sage between her hands and inhaled the scent, bright and fresh, as her mother had taught her, for energy.

Later, she became a writer. She wrote a memoir about her hike, called Wild, that topped worldwide bestseller lists in 2012 and was turned into an Oscar-nominated film. She also wrote a weekly column for the online magazine The Rumpus. In one of these, she wrote about what she would say to her twenty-something self, if she could speak to her now. She said:

‘One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking [how worthless] you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.’

I thought about Strayed’s words when I read, some days ago, about the ‘rebel botanists’ who are using street graffiti to label the wild flowers growing in the cracks of streets, paths, and walls across Europe. They scrawl chalk with arrows to alert passersby to the daisies and the herb Robert, the scarlet pimpernel and the wild fennel – these tiny beautiful things that we don’t usually see.

I smiled when I read this, because a couple of weeks ago, on my daily walk in local woodland, amidst the usual green of dock and nettle I glimpsed something else: a pale green spike, like the hood of an elf, or the flame of a candle. When I saw it, I realised that the whole woodland floor was carpeted with pale green spikes. They were everywhere, rising out of the natural compost, glowing in the sunlight. I had walked through the wood every day for a week, and not noticed. These were wild arum lilies, also known as lords and ladies; the wild cousins of popular houseplants and the majestic titan arum of Indonesia. I love the arum lily, common as it is here in ditches and woodland, because its ethereal green flowers are hidden in plain sight. You don’t see them – and then suddenly you do, and you realise that, like magic, they are everywhere.

It could be woodland; it could be pavements (183 different plants, Sheffield); it could be walls (186 species, Cambridge). So many! Why didn’t I spot the arum lilies? Why do we not see the wild pansies in the sandy corner of a sun-baked wall? (They really are stunning, when you find one.)

Sometimes we look past the tiny beautiful things because we are busy; we are en route somewhere else. Perhaps we feel, as Strayed did, that we don’t deserve them because of our own personal failings. Or perhaps it feels, at this moment in our life, as if no small thing could be meaningful, given the magnitude of our suffering. In the time of coronavirus, perhaps we feel the burden of others’ sorrow so greatly that we feel guilty for enjoying a wild poppy. We have any number of ways to discount tiny beautiful things. In the case of wild flowers, we call them ‘weeds’, untidy disruptors of concrete and clean lines. But what else do we discount, if we turn away from what is small and beautiful? The tiny act of kindness, the smile, the purple balloon.

What if a tiny beautiful thing is not just one thing; what if, when you catch sight of it, you realise that it is all around; what if someone, somewhere, is drawing a chalk sign that says, let’s look at this together; and what if for every tiny beautiful arum lily that you see, there is a giant arum lily growing, silent and majestic, in the rainforests in Indonesia?

When we look at the world a different way, it speaks to us anew. William Blake saw ‘A world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower.’ When we look for the tiny beautiful things, we see what is large, and more beautiful. We are brought back to ourselves, and to each other.

This week, look for the tiny beautiful things. They may be wildflowers or birdsong. They may be your neighbours’ smiles across the road each Thursday, clapping for carers. The green of a tree. The colour of a favourite piece of pottery. A message from a beloved friend. A pile of really good books. The smell of flapjacks, made from oats at the back of the store cupboard, best before August 2016; or maybe a piece of chocolate, with this guided chocolate meditation.

Allow yourself to receive these. Dwell in them, soak them up. They are just as real as anything else that is hard and sad. But what we pay attention to matters, and if we don’t pay attention to the tiny beautiful things, we miss the answering hum of the world and its solace, amidst the sadness.

Soak up that hum, too; you are part of it. Mary Oliver wrote, in her poem ‘Sometimes’:

‘Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.’

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Zoom Fatigue: Staying Embodied Online

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy.

‘Shall we use Skype, Zoom, Teams, or Facetime?’ someone asked me wearily the other day. I was struck both by the dizzying multiplicity of the technologies we currently need for work and life, and by the weariness.

‘Zoom fatigue’ is officially a phenomenon, writes Julia Sklar for National Geographic – and this has come as a surprise to many of us. Yet across the board, students and staff report that online meetings are tiring in a way that in-person meetings are not. Staff describe needing more time to decompress after meetings, while conversations that in person would have been energising seem unexpectedly to drain.

Why is this? As Sklar explains, ‘During an in-person conversation, the brain focuses partly on the words being spoken, but it also derives additional meaning from dozens of non-verbal cues, such as whether someone is facing you or slightly turned away, if they’re fidgeting while you talk, or if they inhale quickly in preparation to interrupt.’

As social beings, this interpretation comes naturally to us and takes place below the level of conscious effort. But ‘a typical video call impairs these ingrained abilities, and requires sustained and intense attention to words instead.’ Online, we can’t see much of a person’s body language; if the lighting is poor, or the image pixelated, we don’t catch the details of their facial expression. In meetings with multiple people, the tiny images on Zoom remove even more of this information, while on Teams, we can only see the last few people to have spoken. We lose the sense of the people in the room, the energy, the mood, the interest.

Meanwhile, that sustained and intense attention to words is tiring, particularly as our attention is also being fragmented by video’s partial visual cues. When this happens, we are essentially multi-tasking, which is known to be psychologically stressful and inefficient. In a long meeting with lots of people, we may find ourselves mentally checking out, or becoming bored. When we ourselves feel unseen, it’s even easier to quietly disappear into some other task. We’ve all been in the meeting where someone’s emails are perfectly reflected in their spectacles.

A Tweet from Gianpiero Petriglieri, professor of management at INSEAD, seems to sum up the human challenge: ‘I spoke to an old therapist friend today, and finally understood why everyone’s so exhausted after the video calls. It’s the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds tricked into the idea of being together when our bodies feel we’re not. Dissonance is exhausting.’

Posted on April 4^th, nearly 37,000 people have liked Petriglieri’s Tweet so far. It seems many of us are having this experience. So how might we reduce some of that sense of disembodiment and dissonance – that gap between what is, and what seems to be, in which boredom, irritation, dissatisfaction, and fatigue emerge?

1. Remember Your Body

One approach is to check in with the felt sense of your own body throughout an online call. Notice the soles of your feet against the floor, the sensations of your seat on the chair, and the weight and contact of your hands in your lap or on your desk. When you begin doing this, it may feel like a surprise to remember that we have feet, or hands. This shows how disembodied the attention has become while online: pulled into the screen and trying to make out the nuances of facial expression; or pulled to the words, and straining to understand their conceptual content. You may pick up on this if you tune into your own body language: are you tilted or hunched forward on your chair, towards your screen? If apathy has set in, you may be slumped back completely. When you pick up on these, bring your attention back into the felt sense of the body sitting. You may also find it helpful to shift your posture; something to remind yourself that your body is here, sitting and breathing. This helps to close the ‘gap’ between body, sitting at your desk, and mind, in the substance of the call.

Over time, you may find that keeping some of your attention in the felt sense of your body sitting actually allows you to ‘receive’, with less effort, the meaning of the words being spoken in the call. Online you may not be able to tune into the nuances of others’ bodies or faces, but your own body picks up on more than you realise. Staying connected to it will help you process the cognitive and affective information being transmitted at the level of conversation.

2. Take Time to Transition

A second approach is deliberately to take time to settle and ground yourself both before and after an online call. By acknowledging these transitions, they come as less of a surprise to your social nervous system. You might take a three-step breathing space before and after a meeting, to help you consciously clock the content of the mind, and step back into the present moment. For a long call, have a glass of water to hand, and check that you are comfortable and your back is supported in your seat.

3. Move and Stretch

You may have noticed that when you hang up after an online meeting, you yawn, stretch, or sigh; this is your nervous system down-regulating, so follow the wisdom of its cues, and take some time to follow it through. For a short and structured way to go about that, this mindful movement practice is just 9 minutes long. If it’s been a particularly stressful or discombobulating meeting – or you’ve simply been online all day – this half hour of gentle stretching followed by a sitting practice could be just what’s needed to help bring your attention back into the body, and the here and now.

Zoom and its parallels are, in myriad ways, a complete boon at this time – and there’s growing awareness that particularly for those on the autism spectrum, video calls may actually be easier and less anxiety-provoking than large in-person meetings. But it’s also understandable that for many of us, with our social minds as human beings complexly evolved over millennia, the ramped-up use of video conferencing presents some unanticipated challenges. You’re not alone in this, so take time to breathe and move – and if all else fails, there’s Britain’s standard energy-lifting go-to: an old-fashioned cup of tea!

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Against Productivity in a Pandemic

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy.

How should we use our time in this strange era?

As the lockdown continues, two different approaches have appeared. One we might term mission productivity. Nick Martin pastiches this in his article for The New Republic, ‘Against Productivity in a Pandemic.’ ‘Did you know Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was quarantined during the plague? Have you tried baking as a form of corona therapy? How about turning your living room into a home gym using soup cans for hand weights?’

We have all this free time now, we think. We must optimise it, and ourselves. During this pandemic we can master Collaborate, write more papers, develop COVID-19-relevant syllabuses, and ‘sprinkle COVID-dust’ on our grant proposals. On the side, we might become better bakers and level up in Duolingo Italian.

But, Martin goes on, ‘This piece, the one you’re reading right now, took roughly an hour longer for me to write than it normally would have because I am currently sitting in my New York apartment thinking about a million different things: Are all my grandparents properly secluded? Is my extended family taking this seriously enough? Should I rent a car and drive home and get away from the city before it all really goes to hell? Are rental car companies going to be price gouging? When will the money from my cancelled vacation return to my account? Did I order enough cat food? Do I have enough food? What will things look like two weeks from now? A year from now?’

It turns out that time is not a zero-sum game. Albeit you may be working remotely, so your commute has disappeared; perhaps we spend less time around the biscuit tin in the common room or the work kitchen. But when the world turns upside down, fears and worries infuse our time with their frenetic tug. There are the logistics of managing the roof over your head, food, healthcare, looking after vulnerable family or neighbours. For many in our University, time demands are increasing, not diminishing. Work requires more phone calls, exam revision needs more chasing emails, or there are small children at home to care for.

And, in the end, life is more than 2 + 2 = 4. The disappeared moments of connection or humour do not add up to an extra half hour of ‘free time’, tidily re-allocated. Meanwhile, at the heart of many fears and worries are important questions: what might the future hold? How do we want to inhabit it – personally, institutionally, and societally? To tend our worries, and use our fear wisely, we need time and space irreducible to the metrics of productivity.

And so another approach has taken shape. In her article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aisha S. Ahmad lays out beautifully ‘Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure.’ Ahmad is assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and she speaks from first-hand experience of crisis, having conducted fieldwork in war zones across the world.

Ahmad shows how beneath the drive for productivity is an assumption that all this is temporary; that we can ‘buckle down for a short stint until things get back to normal’. We see this as an interruption of ordinary business, a lacuna to be plugged according to the usual rules. We wait for the clock to begin to tick again, as it always has. So we bust a gut to produce, or beat ourselves up because we’re too distressed, exhausted, or beset by small crawling people to do so.

But in times of global crisis, Ahmad writes, ‘All of that is noise – denial and delusion. Denial only serves to delay the essential process of acceptance, which will allow us to reimagine ourselves in this new reality.’ So honour your straitened circumstances, she says. Attribute value to the care you give yourself and your loved ones. Once you have recaptured some sense of security and stability in your circumstances under lockdown, ‘The emotionally and spiritually sane response is to prepare to be forever changed.’ And to undergo change, we need a fundamental shift in how we think about productivity and time.

With this in mind, this week’s suggested practice is a twenty-minute sitting meditation in which you can simply sit, be, and allow your mind to be as it will. We need not ‘achieve’ anything in meditation. There are no targets, and no spreadsheets to track our progress. Mindfulness is only ever about gentle, curious awareness of what is actually here. We don’t need to clear the mind, or become calm; we need simply honour things as they are, moment by moment. So acknowledge your mind’s sense of busyness and urgency, see it clearly, know that it’s understandable, and come back to the breath; note your fears and preoccupations, with gentleness. Listen to sounds, the chatter of your own mind, the landscape of sensation in the body. Attend to what is really here, and in so doing, know that this is not ducking out of reality, but rather turning towards it.

When we turn towards what is real and present, we move forward on solid ground. So this week, begin to make mental space around the edges of your to-do list. Notice when you are lost in mission productivity, and begin to experiment with something a little different.

To finish with Ahmad, ‘Be slow. Let this distract you. Let it change how you think and how you see the world. Because the world is our work.’

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Interrupting a Spiralling Mind

This piece was first posted on For Times Like These: Blogs from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy to help us through COVID19 lockdowns and meltdowns, and to raise our spirits.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how the mind usually reacts to stress and difficulty. One typical reaction is that we ruminate: the mind creates an endless thread, infinite possible scenarios in the imagination, all with the underlying sense that if we can only think of everything and pre-emptively solve it, we’ll be ok.

Sometimes we do eventually wind up at a solution, and it’s that sense of hitting the idea jackpot that reinforces the compelling feel of this mental process. It works! We think. Except, of course, all the times that it doesn’t, and instead keeps us up at 3am, or side-tracks us on an afternoon of remote working…

Unpleasant though it can be, a spiralling mind is a fascinating thing to watch. ‘I am an old man and have known a great many troubles,’ Mark Twain is reported to have said, ‘but most of them never happened.’ If you observe closely, there will be an initial trigger: it could be an article or Twitter post that you read, a comment from a friend, a frustrating email. Sometimes, the trigger is itself a creation of the mind. An apparently harmless amble along a familiar mental track takes an unexpected twist, and then, like racehorses out of the gate, we’re off, thoughts bolting for the distant finish line.

When the trigger for a spiralling mind occurs, if you were to slow the moment right down, you would notice two things happen next. First, something physical: a lurch in the stomach, a stony cold feeling in the face, shoulders hunching, chest tightening. These bodily signs are completely normal. They’re an indication of the second thing: an emotion has been triggered. Fear, anger, sadness, and anxiety all show up in the body, and we often feel them physically before we realise that they’re present.

It’s emotional charge that gives the spiralling mind its energy. Emotions are the wind in the mind’s sails. You will have noticed this in good moods, as well as bad: an excited mind will spiral joyously, just as a sad mind will spiral despondently. This makes sense when we consider that emotions are a call to action – a sign for us to attend, and take care. Our mental resources prick up their ears, and get to work.

The trickiness of a spiralling mind is that because of its very energy, it rapidly takes us far away from whatever initially needed attention and care. It will zoom into past, future, and parallel universe, at great speed. Indeed, if you watch the spiralling mind play out, it has the rapidly rotating quality of a hurricane: it hoovers up every relevant fragment of memory, attention, and imagination available. What is ‘relevant’ is governed by the emotional charge. If you are feeling low, memories of previous times you felt low will play across your mind, as if feeling rubbish right now weren’t bad enough. This, incidentally, is why recurring depression feels so hard, because actually it’s not just the weight of this moment on your shoulders; it’s the weight of every other low moment you’ve ever had, bearing down on this one right now.

As well as dredging up the past, and making predictions about the future, the spiralling mind will hone in on everything in the here and now that seems to back up those racing thoughts. Run out of milk? Worry about that, too. Friend not picking up their phone? Fuel to the fire.

When we recognise this process, it’s tempting to get in there and problem-solve. How can I make it stop? Why am I up at 3am yet again? But at this point our problem-solving is running off the storm system itself. When the hurricane of thoughts, emotions, and body sensations gets going, we need something equally powerful to interrupt it – but of a fundamentally different nature.

If the spiralling mind runs on habitual networks of memory and hyper-vigilance, we need deliberate, open, and embodied attention. One of my favourite definitions of mindfulness comes from Ellen Langer, who describes it as ‘…a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context’. The spiralling mind cannot survive an open, flexible, and inquiring awareness, just like wildfire cannot leap across a big enough gap.

The Three-Step Breathing Space

Zindel Segal, one of the creators of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for recurring depression, describes how he, Mark Williams and John Teasdale created a short practice intended to make just this gap. The three-step breathing space is ‘about moving attention in specific ways to help us free ourselves or to get unstuck,’ he writes, and you can try this lovely guided track for it from Mark Williams.

Sometimes called a three-‘minute’ breathing space, the practice can be done in just a few minutes, or extended to longer if you wish. It has three key parts:

1) Acknowledging what’s here in your experience right now: your mood, thoughts, emotions, body sensations. There’s no need to change these, just notice what’s here, with some friendliness.

2) Gathering the attention to the sensations of the breathing somewhere that feels steady, like the abdomen. Notice this in-breath, and this out-breath, just as they are, breathing themselves.

3) Expanding the awareness, to include the whole body sitting, standing, or lying down, just as it is, being itself.

Practice this a few times with the track, and then try doing it by yourself: the beauty of the breathing space is that it’s portable. To remember its steps, you can use the acronym AGE: Acknowledge, Gather, Expand. In our mindfulness courses, we encourage people to practice it two or three times a day in ordinary moments. This helps train the attention to follow its hourglass shape – broad awareness, narrow, broad – so that in those moments when the spiralling mind’s tug is strongest, we have this internal resource at our fingertips.

The breathing space is a short practice, invisible to the onlooker, and can be easy to underestimate. Yet course participants and trainee teachers tell me that there have been times when the breathing space has saved their lives. It does not fix our problems, or make situations go away; at the end of it, there may still be strong thoughts and feelings around. Things still need our attention, and action.

But what the practice does is create space. Space, far from being a vacuum, is potent. Sometimes, it is enough at the end of a breathing space to notice, ‘wow, I really am upset right now,’ and to attend to that with care. At their simplest, the gap around the wildfire and the pause in the storm offer a chance for this moment to be different than it would have been otherwise. Short, and deceptively quiet, there are days when the breathing space’s slivers of difference make all the difference.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.