This month, I got through a couple of books with the theme of “overcome difficult times and grow”. They offer inspirations that we may not find in our daily routines.
When things fall apart (Heart advice for difficult times)
By Pema Chodron
A book of advice how we deal with the off-center, vulnerable in between states. In difficult times, wenaturally want to revert back to what we have lived as before. After illness or injuries, we strive to get back our lost faculties. Just like people with acrophobia desperate to revert to ground level. This book offers abundant wisdom that things are always in transition and the transition can be an ideal state to open our hearts and minds beyond what you think is possible.
The book is jam-packed with advices and Buddhist philosophies. The content is not very organized, whichmakes it hard to digest and effort to ponder what to take or not to take from the read.
This has been my bedtime read for a while and there is a lot to like about.
A stitch of time: the year a brain injury changed my language and life
By Lauren Marks
A sudden rupture in aneurysm (a stroke) changes the life of Lauren. Lauren was a reader, actress, director pursuing her PhD. After her brain injury, she has aphasia and lost her language ability. This is her story of resilience, her documentary of how she lives her new self, and how she reconnects in a changed way with her family, her brother, her boyfriend, her friends.
More than a year after her injury, she asked the doctor “when should I consider myself recover enough?” And her doctor said “Recovery looks different for different people. For someone who wasn’t interested in language in the first place, they sometimes feel like their language is as good as it will ever be in the first months after their stroke. But someone who made their careers in words? Who is to say when they are recovered enough?”
Lauren shows exceptional courage in her remarkable journey since the rupture. Her talent in storytelling is remarkable with or without aphasia. Her rupture would have shattered her life; instead, she shows us hope and possibilities even in the worst moments.
oliviatamccue 
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