The New Daily: Turning Down the Noise: Journalist Christine Jackman goes in search of silence

There were no light-bulb moments or blinding flashes of clarity.

Unfortunately, enlightenment tends to be a messier and blurrier process than that bright, crisp word ‘enlighten’ suggests. And ‘the getting of wisdom’ is only a straightforward linear narrative in the book by Henry Handel Richardson. In real life, it’s more like a game of snakes and ladders: we try our best and advance a few steps, but then we slip back into bad habits and have to start inching forward all over again.

To complicate matters, most of us are much better at articulating what we don’t want than what we do, which is how we come to spend an awful lot of time avoiding things we don’t like while remaining incapable of recognising the things we actually need.

A few months after my father’s fall, I certainly knew what I didn’t want: I didn’t want to keep talking. As someone who had built a career in communications—who had even, for a while, been paid generously by the word for tapping out her opinions in a weekly newspaper column—this came as quite a surprise.

Read more of this edited extract from Turning Down The Noise on The New Daily.