Any Ordinary Day
Blindsides, Resilience and What Happens After the Worst Day of Your Life
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4.3 • 420 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The day that turns a life upside down usually starts like any other, but what happens the day after?
Dual Walkley Award-winner Leigh Sales investigates how ordinary people endure the unthinkable.
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.
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'Warm, wise and humble.' ANNA FUNDER
'Masterfully written, revelatory and genuinely uplifting.' BETTER READING
'Asks questions most of us would only dare to think.' THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
Customer Reviews
Fantastic reading
An engaging read - highly recommend
Magnificent
I have been wanting to read this for ages and I picked it up after having one of those ordinary days when something shocking happened out of left field. It really helped me start to process that loss and it was just a fascinating read. Loved it, highly recommend.
Any Ordinary Day
G’day Leigh. Congratulations on the written result of your dedication to telling the story and your quest to understand the crashing waves, the still streams and the undercurrents of life in response to trauma. I have highlighted more text in this book of revelations to be reviewed than I have any text book I had to study, any book I’ve read, except my bible. I enjoyed the way you have respected people and faith in the searching and the telling, without imposing your world view. I serve my community as a chaplain and found a number of insights relevant to that role, as well as to my everyday calling as a husband, father, agronomist and counsellor and confidante to bent (but not broken) farmers that have endured the extremes of weather and pestilence in recent times. I wrote during the drought of my growers going beyond the resilience phase, to one of survival. I like the way you handled survivors becoming endurers as they continue to walk, run and tumble on into their chosen life in the open air casino we call farming! Bless you Leigh. Other Plugger.