The question
What lesson has mattered most in your life?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two fully readable publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
It’s all a gift. So be grateful for every day.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 24 January 2026 source ↗
Life’s too short to take offence.
You are good enough.
Discipline. Also to have a goal, however small and whatever it may be.
Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
For my dad not to have known our boys.
Caring too much about what others think.
Faith-filled, never-give-up man.
We finally get to be with Jesus, face to face.
A soldier and adventure guy.
An apocalypse escape vessel – a steel hull ice-capable sailing boat for all the family that has almost zero electronics and is manual operation throughout – armed with an array of weaponry.
Oliver Sacks, Paapa Essiedu, Warren Zevon, Simon Boas, Richard Coles, Robert Carlyle
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