They taught me more about, in the midst of all this trauma and suffering and uncertainty - of remaining true to who you are,
and what love can be about in those moments. And there are three or four of those that really stand out very strongly,
whose lives were very different but who were kind of my teachers.
A therapist describing the impact on himself of working with clients struggling with AIDS

You can access a downloadable Word format version of this post by clicking here.

I'm a member of three different groups, all of which meet occasionally in the evening.  Since two of the groups only get together about every six weeks, it's unusual for all three group meetings to occur in the same seven days.  In fact I can't remember it happening before.  It's happening this week though - hence the trigger for this blog post "Different kinds of group, different kinds of friendship". 

The group that meets pretty much every week is probably the most straightforward.  We've been getting together for many years to play badminton for a couple of hours.  It's great.  I hugely enjoy it.  It's warm too - we're friendly and we joke a lot.  We encourage each other and we're very competitive as well.  However with most of these guys, I hardly meet them except to play badminton.  I could tell you very little about how their lives are going, or about how they're usually feeling.

I read a lot of research.  When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 13,800 abstracts. 

All day Friday and all day Saturday exploring Berlin.  Then on Saturday evening we went to a reasonable restaurant and this morning - Sunday - I woke with what seems to be a pretty good dose of food poisoning.  Humph.  Well it's been a peaceful day for me with my system gradually recovering.  Dear Catero has had a tourist time on her own, popping in now and again to see how I'm doing.  Gradually and steadily getting better is the answer.  By late morning I was up for reading again.  The book I have with me isn't as appealing as I'd hoped (rather jaundiced "realism"), so I've been enjoying looking at some research papers on self-affirmation!  Sad or what?! 

I read a lot of research.  When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 13,600 abstracts. 

Wednesday morning - about 36 hours since we got back to Edinburgh and less than a week since we began the group.  The last half day started as usual with some of the "self-care practices" that quite a few us use (Tai Chi, meditation, running, and so on).  Good breakfast, then sadly one of the group needed to leave early due to a crisis at home.  He asked if we could meet ten minutes sooner than usual as a full group so he could voice his appreciations and say goodbye to us.  Moving.  Normally we're pretty tough that anybody who bids in to come for the group should make sure that they can stay for the full time - obviously though there are exceptions to these loose "rules".