The question
What lesson has mattered most in your life?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two fully readable publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Redemption. People can be redeemed, goals can be redeemed.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 April 2025 source ↗
To keep going and never give up, and to enjoy it to the absolute full because, at any moment, the curtain can fall.
That things change.
I think I actually wrote it in one of my poems is that my decline has been the making of me - I forget how I put it. Yeah, simply more reflective. I haven't got the excuse of moving forward just on impulse anymore, which I did, I think, for a long, long time.
That it will go on quite happily without me.
An accounting is given of our lives. Did you give more than you’ve taken? Hurt more people than you’ve helped?
Losing the people that I love.
Because it’s in one of my songs, War and Peace.
The Covid years. My life is diminished since then. I lost my brother. My children lost some social expression, and we are still recovering from that.
Empathetic, humble and strong.
Telling a story to my son about my brother.
Diana Athill, Shinya Yamanaka, Mario Molina, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Isabel Allende, Phoebe Dynevor
Search the directory for somebody in particular.