As I walk through the park, I find myself reflecting on the year 2020 – when COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation, and how it felt as though the world changed almost overnight. There was no warning that felt sufficient, no gradual easing into it – just a quiet, collective shift that altered how we lived, moved, and saw one another. The familiar became uncertain, and the ordinary suddenly carried weight.
Back then, stepping outside felt like both freedom and risk. I became acutely aware of my place in the world, of the space between myself and others. Every passing stranger was no longer invisible; we acknowledged each other through careful distance, small adjustments, silent agreements to protect not just ourselves, but one another. It was a strange kind of togetherness – one built on separation.
What that time reminds me, even now, is how quickly a life can narrow. The world we had known – full schedules, open movement, assumed futures, contracted into something much smaller. As I walk here today, noticing the continuity of the park and the ordinary movement of life around me, it strikes me that this kind of sudden shift is not unique to a global pandemic. Lives can change in a moment in countless ways – through illness, loss, unexpected news, or events that stop us in our tracks and alter our direction entirely. COVID was simply a shared experience of something deeply human: the loss of control, the confrontation with uncertainty, and the need to adapt.
Now, as I continue walking through this same park, the urgency of that time has softened, but its imprint remains. The world has opened up again in many ways, yet something in me has stayed changed.
In the work that I do, I am reminded again and again that each of us encounters moments where life, as we know it, is suddenly thrown into disarray. Clients speak of the point at which everything shifts – when the trajectory they had imagined for themselves quietly, or sometimes violently, changes course. There are the more recognisable losses: a job gone, a relationship ended, the death of someone deeply loved. But there are also the moments that may seem smaller from the outside, yet carry just as much weight – the musician whose bows are accidentally broken, the loss of a much-loved animal, the unexpected diagnosis that arrives without warning and reshapes everything that follows.
What unites these experiences is not the event itself, but the way it stops us – the way it interrupts the flow of a life we thought we understood. In those moments, we are confronted with what we cannot control, and often cannot yet make sense of.
Most of us struggle with uncertainty. Yet part of my work is to gently remind clients that uncertainty is not an interruption to life, it is woven into the fabric of being alive.
So as I reflect on this, I find myself returning to a quiet understanding: that whatever happens to us, however suddenly life changes, we are asked, again and again, to meet what comes.
To notice what we lose, but also what remains. And sometimes, what emerges that we could never have anticipated.
What I know is that there will be moments for all of us, when everything feels undone – when the ground beneath us no longer feels steady, and the life we knew seems out of reach. In those moments, it can be hard to believe that anything solid still exists.
But perhaps it is here that something else begins. Not certainty, but trust. A trust that, even in the midst of disarray, we can find within ourselves a willingness, however small, to begin again.
And we do not have to do that alone.
Therapy can offer a space where someone walks alongside us through that uncertainty. A space to make sense of what has been lost, to gently recognise what remains, and to begin, piece by piece, to rebuild meaning. To hold hope, even when it feels distant. To find it, even in the places that feel empty.