It’s all a learning experience, even if it’s a shit time.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 24 April 2021 source ↗
The question
If you could revise one chapter of your past, what would you change?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
It’s all a learning experience, even if it’s a shit time.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 24 April 2021 source ↗
I read too much science fiction to mess with anything. I’d be terrified that, by changing something, my kids wouldn’t be mine.
My mum died in her early 70s, and for the last six or seven years of her life she couldn’t move, didn’t speak. By the time our children were born, she was too ill to communicate. I haven’t many regrets in life, but I do regret that they never got to know her, even though she was still alive for a few years. They couldn’t see her warmth, her spirit, her courage.
I practise stoicism. Not the stiff-upper-lip, modern stuff, but the ancient Greek philosophy. You have to accept what you can’t change. I try to face forwards all the time. When that doesn’t work, I think about buying a machine gun.
I wouldn’t have hurt as many people, and I would have thought more before speaking.
Maybe the night we drove a Hummer in Kabul and went to a cafe that Osama bin Laden supposedly used to frequent.
As somebody who brought joy to people.
A veterinarian, but I decided against it because it required too many years of schooling; I wasn’t great at school.
Having my family in closer proximity, but that’s what comes with living in another country.
In the hospital after my C-section, hanging out with my new baby, feeling very, very happy and grateful.
Katherine Parkinson, Kiefer Sutherland, Eleanor Tomlinson, Guy Pearce, Patricia Hodge, Charlotte Church
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