Whenever things seem absolutely terrible, to see that you’re alive and that’s all that matters.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 22 March 2025 source ↗
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.
Whenever things seem absolutely terrible, to see that you’re alive and that’s all that matters.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 22 March 2025 source ↗
A 'no' is free.
Everything’s temporary, and how to make aioli.
Now, what did I learn from it? I learned that there were people, mostly in the other party, who believe in free trade but didn’t really believe in doing anything for people who lost jobs. That is, every trade deal produces winners and losers, so this was going to work for us in a lot of ways because the Mexicans had much higher tariffs than we did. And because, if you’re a wealthy country, the jobs trade creates pay above the average wage, and often the jobs that are lost pay below. But it’s always assumed that all those people will be retrained and that there will be incentives to invest within driving distance of where they live to create new jobs. And we lost the Congress in ‘94, and I couldn’t get the money, and there was no interest in it until my last year as president when we passed something called the New Markets Initiative. So if I had it to do again, I’d get the money on the front end, and I’d say, “No, no, no, no. I need more money to help the people who will lose the jobs.” I just assumed, I think probably because I had — the Congress was the majority of our party, and also because the people that were for NAFTA, I couldn’t imagine that they wouldn’t want to help the people that wouldn’t be winners.
Life is not worth living if there is no one you would die for.
When I was climbing I was absolutely happy. I can use a climbing wall, but that’s not the same as real climbing.
Resourceful, resilient and compassionate.
Compassion, resourcefulness and resilience form a rounded good person. So that’s what I’d like to leave my children and grandchildren.
I left the army and got a job with Unilever in Northern Ireland. They were very strict and you had to have a hat, and when you went into a shop you had to raise your hat to the shopkeeper and then sell your wares. I was selling margarine.
The loss of Conrad.
Everest the hard way in 1975: leading the expedition that succeeded where so many people had tried and failed. That was the most complex mountaineering challenge I ever faced. I spent hours at night in a little tent thinking about what the next problem would be and how to solve it.
Paul Merson, Ronnie O'Sullivan, Monica Dolan, Justin Hawkins, Philippa Dunne, Chaka Khan
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