Here I sit on a Sunday morning, drinking my coffee and reading a book – Any Ordinary Day. Blindsides, resilience and what happens after the worst day of your life by Leigh Sales.
I’m feeling intense happiness – it’s not hot (finally – we’ve had the hottest summer on record) and I can feel a touch of cooler air on my skin. The butcher birds and magpies are celebrating the day. That’s all it takes to make me happy.
And it’s just that – finding happiness in the smallest of things; that happiness is not a goal – I’ve just read a discussion of this subject in Leigh Sales’ book and it has struck enough of a chord for me to write about the subject (yet again).
I’m really enjoying Any Ordinary Day. Leigh Sales is a highly respected journalist with the ABC, yet what we’ve got here is not ‘journalistic’ at all. It’s a book written in a very open, honest and personal voice. Being a journalist myself, however, I’m really liking the peek into her personal thoughts about her work.
But more than that, it’s a book that looks at people who have suffered the most extraodinary traumatic events in their life, and how they have come out at the other end. Leigh Sales interviewed people we’ve all seen on our televisions, wondering how on earth they emotionally and psychologically survive, how they get through their days – Walter Mikac (Port Arthur massacre), Stuart Diver (Thredbo landslide), Louisa Hope (Lindt Cafe) are just three of them. She talked to professionals who helped these people – policemen, counsellors, a coroner.