The Challenge of Change is explicitly described as a resilience training programme.  Conventionally, resilience is thought of as a measure of adaptability and recovery, illustrated by the story of the oak and the reed struck by a storm: where the mighty but inflexible oak is felled, the reed bends in the wind and returns to the upright when the storm recedes. 

Like all metaphors the story is only a partial truth . . .

‘They were meant for each other’.  Really?  The truth is that nobody is intended for anyone else: relationships happen by chance.  If you use a dating app you have some choice as to who you might want to meet, and however you end up meeting someone, you do have a choice as to whether or not to proceed with the relationship.

If you lined up a large random sample of people, ranging from the shortest at one end to the tallest at the other, you’d notice that most are clustered around the average height, with fewer and fewer people towards the shorter and taller ends.  You could then plot the distribution on a graph, with height in intervals of one centimetre along the horizontal axis and the number of people in each interval on the vertical axis.  Smoothing out the dots, the distribution would be more or less bell-shaped – hence the bell-curve.

Nothing is forever.  Everything – every plant, animal, planet, star – exists for a while and then passes.  ‘A while’ might range from a day for a mayfly to billions of years for a star, but pass they will.  As far as we can tell, only humans are obsessed with finding some way of contradicting the nature of things and living longer.  To what end?  The only justifiable motive would be if those extra years benefited others, but there’s little evidence for that.  Instead, it seems merely clinging for as long as possible to the temporary form that each of us calls ‘me’.  Prolonging such a life offers little more than an extended opportunity to shop.