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Six small steps to a joyful life

March 17, 2019 By Carmel Thomason

In an increasingly complex world, Carmel Thomason offers practical ways to simplify life and see the extraordinary in the everyday.

Speak Kindly

Sometimes people say unpleasant things more out of habit than intended harm. I once worked with a woman who repeated nasty comments she overheard adding: ‘I always say forewarned is forearmed.’ In other words, she justified repeating cruel remarks by saying she was helping me. She wasn’t. Those words hurt and made me suspicious of people I otherwise might have had a good relationship with. After all, haven’t we all said something about someone at some time to let off steam?

Photo by Bewakoof.com Official on Unsplash

It’s easy to feel like we’re bonding when we complain, but any support we feel from this is short lived. If you want to find fault with other people there will always be something. The same is true for your career, your home, or anything in the world. There is always plenty to grumble and complain about, but the opposite is also true. Don’t miss opportunities to speak kindly because you’re too busy focusing on what’s wrong. If you think something nice about someone, be free with your compliments and let them know.

Be the peacemaker

It’s upsetting when people assume the worst of you. Working as a journalist I meet lots of people in all kinds of situations. Unfortunately, some believe all journalists are sour people who only want to tell the worst of life. It’s fine if someone doesn’t want to talk to me, but often these same people are very vocal about it. Even in social situations they make it clear they don’t want to speak to me in case I write about them, yet take umbrage when I do what they ask and ignore them.

Faced with such hostility it would be easy to become cynical, to forget that these people are a noisy minority, and to begin to act in the underhand manner they expect. But, would that make me feel better about myself or help me to enjoy my job?

It is easy to get caught up in other people’s chaos and allow them to distract you from the good God is working in your life. Choose to see the best in people and view anyone who brings chaos to your day as an opportunity to practise letting go of minor irritations and forgiving quickly. Don’t wait for other people to change until you can feel at peace; peace starts with you.

Trust God

Sometimes we learn to lean on God by practising letting go of small every day anxieties. Other times it takes a situation so clearly out of our control that we have nowhere else to turn but God before we truly experience what it means to put our trust in him.

Trusting God means that we don’t need to speculate or over analyse, going over and over the same problem. If there is something we can do to help the situation then God will guide us in that direction, no amount of worrying is going to change it.

In my garden I put smooth pebbles on the top of my plant pots. They look pretty and also help protect the plants from losing too much water in the summer months. When I begin to worry about something I’ll hold a pebble in my hand, pray about the situation and then lay the pebble down.

Whenever I notice I’m thinking about the same problem I look out onto the garden and feel reassured that I’ve given it to God. I might not understand or like where I am, but I know that God is in control. He will sustain me and work all things out for good.

Say thank you

Several times in the Bible we are encouraged to count our blessings. I particularly like Psalms 103:2 which reminds us to remember all God’s benefits.

When our blessings become familiar, they can be easy to overlook. Some years ago I took a trekking holiday in Costa Rica where we camped, drank water from streams, ate little more than rice and beans, and lived without a shower, flushing lavatory or comfortable bed. Coming home a soak in the bath felt like the most decadent experience in the world, and for a short-time I began to see small luxuries, like snuggling under a duvet, in a different way.

On my trip I bought some ground coffee from a local factory. Drinking it reminded me of all the people I’d seen working to produce my morning cuppa. It made me savour the taste. I began enjoying my food more too, thinking about the variety of produce available within a short distance of my home, and all the people who work to make that possible. I benefiting from the work and talents of so many people and yet I’d started to believe that by going to the supermarket, paying for the food and cooking it, I was somehow doing it all myself.

Ask God to help you appreciate all of his kindnesses, so that in recognising how much you already have, you can confidently reach out and ask: who can I bless in return?

Appreciate the people in your life

As a journalist I’ve written on many subjects, but the most memorable was one for which I had to do no research at all – how I feel about my mother. Coming up to Mother’s Day I was asked to write about what my mum means to me. On the face of it, this should have been the easiest assignment in the world. Yet it made me realise just how infrequently I stopped to think about and appreciate specific qualities about the people I love.

When asked a question like that I was all too aware how easy it is to slip into spouting platitudes. Yes, such words might be true, but do they reach to the heart of a person?

The headline on the story read, ‘Telling your mum how special she is means more than any gift’. I still sent a Mother’s Day card and bought a present for my mum that year. Presents and cards are tokens of appreciation, but it is the appreciation that is the real gift, and it is a greater gift than any money can buy.

Think about a person in your life who you love. If you had to write something about what they mean to you, what would you say? Offer a prayer of thanks to God for bringing this person into your life.

Be the miracle

We all have incidents when someone seems to have shown up just at the right time. Had they come into our lives minutes later or earlier things could have been very different.

A friend of mine was enjoying a country walk with his family when his mother-in-law suddenly took ill. It was a remote spot, and none of them could get a phone signal to call for help. Within a couple of minutes a young woman came down the hill. It turned out, she was a medic and recognised immediately what was wrong. ‘We had seen no-one all day, and then she shows up out of the blue when we needed someone,’ my friend said. ‘It was like she was an angel.’

In that woman’s kindness my friend and his family saw a reflection of the divine that is within all of us. In acting out our faith, we give life to God’s spirit within us and we never know where that might lead. What may seem a small act to us could be part of a miracle God is working in someone else’s life.

Goodbye to hospice pioneer, Mary Butterwick

October 1, 2015 By Carmel Thomason

Yesterday I lost a dear friend, Mary Butterwick. At 91-years-old you could say that she had a good long life, and you’d be right. She certainly lived every one of those years to the full and her enthusiasm for life never waned. I will miss her and her love for life. Perhaps that’s why she never seemed old to me. Wise – yes, but never old.

We last spoke a couple of weeks ago and she was reminding me I needed to eat more. ‘It’s not hard,’ she told me, ‘All you have to do is lift the fork to your mouth. If I can do it in here (meaning the hospice) you can do it. Just get some Weetabix and a banana, that’s not hard to eat.’

She was worried about me because I’d lost some weight recently. Since we met 16 years ago she has always looked out for me – I’ll miss her straight-talking kindness.

It is hard to talk about someone you love in the past tense, when you’ve barely taken in that they’ve gone. I’m not going to try to do that. Mary’s work in founding the Butterwick Hospice which carries her name, was the catalyst for how we met all those years ago. Below I’ve pasted an article I wrote for the Sunday Sun newspaper in 2012 which explains a bit more.

Mary Butterwick pioneered hospice care in the north east as we know it today.

Carmel Thomason looks back on her extraordinary achievement.

HOW many times have you said: ‘This is terrible’, ranted for a few minutes and then forgotten all about it the next day?

If you’re anything like me you’ve probably lost count. It’s easy to feel momentarily outraged while reading a newspaper or watching the news.

Sometimes, however, there are times when we all genuinely wish that things could be different yet feel helpless to do anything about it.

So often I’ve told myself, if only I had more money, power, knowledge or influential friends, then I’d do something about whatever it is I think could be better.

And that is why I find Mary Butterwick so extraordinary. At the time when she started campaigning for better palliative care in the north east, Mary was a 54-year-old widow who worked part-time in a tea factory. She had no formal education, no medical background or influential friends. But she believed in the power of love, recognised the importance of our smallest actions and had the strength to speak her mind to take action against injustice.

Mary stood up against the status quo of the time and said: “This is wrong – we should try to change it.” Her belief in something better and her passion to make it happen sowed the seeds of hospice care as we know it today in the region to the benefit of thousands of families.

I first met Mary when I was asked to interview her while working as a feature writer for the Evening Gazette in Middlesbrough. Her story struck an instant chord with me because my grandmother had died following a very short illness, aged 52, in the same month that Mary lost her husband, John.

It was at opposite ends of the country, but the lack of care in the hospitals during that bitter cold winter of 1979 and the hurt this caused were exactly the same.

Of course it was a shock to lose someone so close, almost without warning, but it was the careless words, the lack of dignity and respect for life that created even deeper wounds that were so hard to heal.

If we both had experienced this, then I knew that there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of others who felt the same.

Many years later, my grandfather died at St Ann’s Hospice in Manchester. The contrast in care, while it didn’t make the loss any less, meant that we were able to spend his last days enjoying our time together. As a family we all felt loved and cared for in a time of vulnerability.

The care we experienced was the type of care that Mary had longed for and I knew first hand that what she had worked so hard to achieve had made a difference to people’s lives.

It was clear that John’s death had changed Mary’s outlook on life irrevocably. They were war time sweethearts and had just celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary. Then within two weeks Mary’s life was shattered when John took ill and died, a loss that was magnified by careless words from some hospital staff and the fact that he had fallen several times while in hospital.

Mary firmly believed that there had to be a better way to care for people than this. However, her dream didn’t happen quickly or easily.

Mary and John Butterwick on their wedding day

Bereavement can be a self-pitying time, as Mary discovered, and she admits there were times when she contemplated ending it all. She believed no-one knew the depth of grief she felt and that her life would never be the same again. After such a personal loss, it was obvious that the life she was left with was going to be vastly different from the one she knew. But she realised in time that, as life becomes different, so you can make it into something good, something special again.

It was through volunteering with a community group for people with disabilities that Mary began to laugh again. Being part of the group stopped her focusing on herself and her own pain. Of course it didn’t take the pain away completely, but it gave her a diversion, helping her to turn a corner in her grief and start seeing the outside world again.

To move Mary realised that she needed to forgive not only the medical staff who made careless comments but herself too. She had tortured herself with ‘what if’s? Should she have been able to see earlier that John had cancer?

However, forgiving and forgetting are two very different things. What Mary could never forget was the unnecessary pain caused to John by neglect, be it intentional or not. She couldn’t accept the inability of some people to treat others as human beings, and that meant everyone, even those who had been diagnosed as being terminally ill. Whatever that meant in real terms, and she still didn’t fully understand it, she knew it didn’t mean that these people were any less alive than anyone else.

The important part, in her eyes, was to get on with living and to make the most of opportunities. To care for one another and to let those closest to us know how much we love and value them – simple things, which cost so little in monetary terms, but which can mean so much. It was these simple things which she felt had been denied to John at the end.

If a person couldn’t be made physically better, then there should be somewhere where they could spend time and leave feeling healthier in mind and spirit.

Today such end of life care is something we often take for granted. Now, with at least 14 hospices in the north east, it is hard to imagine why Mary felt that there was no option but to sell her house to set up the region’s first. However, it’s more astonishing how someone near retiring age would not only have the courage but also the energy to do it.

Selling her home was a bold move. It was saying I’ve put my money where my mouth is, now will you join me?

The people of the north east did join her and today Butterwick Hospice has grown into two purpose-built hospices and outreach services, caring for up to 200 patients and their families each day.

Aged 86, Mary is still a regular volunteer and as passionate about helping others as ever. In 2002 she was awarded an OBE for services to the hospice movement, she has an honorary Master of Science at Teesside University and was given Freedom of the Borough of Stockton.

Mary’s story demonstrates how the smallest of our actions can make a difference for the better or worse. There are things we can do nothing about, but so often our perceived helplessness means that we do nothing about those things that we can change. The big question is always, what can I do?

If we are to make every moment count then we need to do what we can instead of worrying about what we can’t.

Every Moment Counts: A Life of Mary Butterwick is published by Darton, Longman & Todd, £10.99.

The Happiest People Forgive

August 1, 2015 By Carmel Thomason

As a journalist I meet all kinds of people. Despite the stereotypical view, I usually want to make people look their best. Sometimes it’s harder than others, because some people don’t help themselves. They’ve already decided all journalists are sour people who want to tell the worst of life. There are people who make it clear that they don’t want to talk to me in case I write about them, and then take umbrage when I do what they want and ignore them. Usually these are people who have nothing interesting to say anyway. And then there are people who have such an amazing story to tell that meeting them has changed my view of the world.

Ray Rossiter holding a piece of the Burma railway

Ray Rossiter is one of those people. I first met Ray when I called him about an exhibition that the Imperial War Museum North was running about the experiences of prisoners of the Japanese during World War II. Lots of men were interviewed for that exhibition. They all had fascinating tales to tell, but there was something about Ray that stuck with me. Some men understandably said that they could never eat rice again after their experience. Ray said: “I love rice, it kept me alive.”

When I spoke to Ray he asked if I was going to visit him. Given the time constraints of my news desk I couldn’t. Then he told me that his wife had dementia and he was the sole carer. I realised that he probably wasn’t getting out of the house much at all, so I said that while I couldn’t visit him in work time, I would go to see him. I suppose I went to his house the first time because I felt sorry for him and his situation, but as time went on Ray was to touch my heart in a way that I could never have expected.

Ray - top right. Three out of five of the soldiers died in prisoner of war camps. — Ray – top right. Three out of five of the soldiers died in prisoner of war camps.

In my job I was used to people calling me to ask me to fight their corner, seek justice for a wrong done to them, even if it was simply to expose it. I’d hear people describe anything from a cross word between friends to the most heinous of crimes as unforgiveable. Yet, here was a man who had suffered unimaginable wrongs and he carried no bitterness. As Christians we talk about forgiveness all the time, but it can feel quite abstract. When we actually witness it lived out, as Ray is doing, it is life-changing.

When Ray talks about the war he says: ‘I felt that God was there all the time, his love shining through the actions of men, one for another. He was there in every kindness, every act of compassion – it is how we survived. It was often said: “It’s every man for himself in here,” but in reality nothing was further from the truth. We depended so much on one another for encouragement, morale-boosting and in numerous instances for our very survival.’

The friendships Ray forged in those adverse times were ones which were to last a lifetime. The men he knew then, men who could be cheerful under the most appalling circumstances, were not men who could let bitterness eat into their souls and he didn’t like to see hatred consuming them in this way. It was a big ask, Ray more than anyone knew that, but he wanted to encourage them, for their own sake, to forgive.

‘Even years later it was a taboo subject among our fellows and it wasn’t an easy thing to get across because it’s hard to comprehend just how much there was to forgive,’ he says. ‘We came out of captivity breathing fire and vengeance against the whole Japanese race – all of us believed at that time that it would be impossible ever to forgive them. Yet while every instinct may be screaming at us to hate them for what they did, we have to stifle this natural impulse. We can’t go on hating forever. The happiest people are those who can find it in their hearts to forgive.

‘Peace within a person is where it all starts, because the actions of nations are merely the actions of men writ large. No-one who has personal experience of world war ever wants to see another one. While there is life, strength and breath in our bodies we should be striving for a better world and our better world will come if the common people of the world wish for it and work for it hard enough’.

We can speculate forever about why things happen or why some people do terrible things, but we rarely find the answers we seek. Jesus showed us another way and people like Ray are showing it is possible. Thankfully, he’s not alone. Since meeting Ray I’ve met many people who have made forgiveness in a reality in their life. All of them share a desire to make the world a better place, one in which these huge wrongs might never happen in the first place.

It’s a vision that is shared by the Restorative Justice Council, which give victims the chance to tell offenders the real impact of their crime, and holds offenders to account for what they have done, enabling everyone affected by a particular incident to play a part in repairing the harm and finding a positive way forward.

It was through the Restorative Justice Process that Joanne Nodding was able to meet and forgive the man who raped her. She says: ‘Did I hate him? For a while afterwards you could probably say that I did, but you can’t go on living with hate in your heart forever. Well, I can’t anyway. I’m not a person who feels hatred. That feeling isn’t me, or it’s not the me I recognise, and it’s not the me I want to be. Besides, hating him is not going to change what happened.

‘I could sit here, thinking, “God, why has this person done this to me?” Or I could say, “God help me to forgive and help him to have a better life”. Everyone can change and everyone deserves a chance to change. As I see it, I could either hate him for the rest of my life or I could forgive him’.

I can’t begin to understand what Ray and Joanne went through, but the goodness they reflect through their capacity for forgiveness makes me want to live a better life. They’ve made me think about how many opportunities I have each day to either forgive or not, to let go of pain or to let it weigh heavy in my heart. Do I need to focus on a throwaway remark from a stranger so that it spoils the rest of my day? Am I open to accept help even when it doesn’t come from where I might expect it? Can I be more loving, grateful and less critical? Can I focus on the good in people? What I’ve learned is that life can be messy, but we are all given choices every day. In choosing to forgive we are choosing to love, and to live the best life we can today.

Six small steps to a joyful life

Goodbye to hospice pioneer, Mary Butterwick

The Happiest People Forgive

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