Suzanne Askham

Wellbeing notes: The therapy of small things

I’d come home from a really stressful term of studies. I was questioning everything I’d ever learnt, anxious about the truth and direction of my life. 

Home at that time was an Italian villa by a lake where water buffalo roamed, and mafiosi ruled. Home seemed so different from the English university I’d just left. And the contrast just made things worse.

But then something small happened. I was walking in the garden, between green lemon trees and a wall where purple bougainvillea grew. Beneath the wall, my mother and brother were positioning a section of flattened tree trunk. “It’s a bench,” my mum explained. 

Curiously, when she said that, something within me settled. All those big questions, crowding my mind… they were abstract problems. You couldn’t touch them, like you could touch the lemon trees or the bougainvillea. And a bench in the garden where people could sit, and maybe heal from whatever was troubling them… you could touch that. 

Right then, I began to appreciate the therapy of small things.

Fast forward to present times, to Wiltshire, in England. Last week, a young family friend came to stay, anxious and needing a break from uni. There was no handy tree trunk to turn into a bench. But I was looking after my neighbours’ hens. So, I invited her to help me feed them. 

As the hens tucked into lettuce, she visibly relaxed.  “I needed this,” she said.

And I hoped then that the therapy of small things had found another fan.