Bend words. Stretch them, squash them, mash them up, fold them. Turn them over or swing them upside down. Make up new words. Leave a place for the strange and downright impossible ones. Use ancient words. Hold on to the gangly, silly, slippy, truthful, dangerous, out-of-fashion ones.

One thing that stress does is make us ungenerous, so we constrict, we look after our own. We get solipsistic and go into our own narcissistic spiral. What this taught me is that there is a way of dealing with stress that is much more welcoming and open and hospitable to the world.

You can make change or it can make YOU. Change is to keep us on our toes. Change is to make us look more closely. What doesn't change are the arms you use to hug with. Those stay the same.

Sometimes you have to whisper to be heard. Our culture is very much one of "bigging it up," always upping the noise level in order to produce a louder signal.

The one thing I'd thought of is that we spend most of our lives in survival time. There's a sense of hanging off the ledge, trying to tread water, trying to keep ahead of the deadlines or the business of the city.

I wanted to talk about certain things in a way that I hadn't seen them talked about. There is vast literature about caring for people romantically, about caring for children, but there's not a lot about caring for older people, eldercare. I was searching for a book that would speak to me, that wouldn't be sociological, that would offer some insight, some solace.

Bend words. Stretch them, squash them, mash them up, fold them. Turn them over or swing them upside down. Make up new words. Leave a place for the strange and downright impossible ones. Use ancient words. Hold on to the gangly, silly, slippy, truthful, dangerous, out-of-fashion ones.