As I write, I am currently recovering from complex wrist surgery. I have had to do everything with my Left non-dominant hand, and it has been a steep learning curve. In other ways, it has also been surprisingly easy. Maybe my brain likes a challenge, and perhaps I am more ambidextrous than I realised? I like to think that an upside of a painful experience is that I am re-wiring my brain.

My spiritual director prompted me to look for what might be ‘gift’ in amongst the realities of severe pain and diminished energy. She wasn’t being unsympathetic or unkind. Simply prompting me to actively look for ‘gifts’ or treasures of darkness. Any source of pain can be physically and psychologically crushing. A flattening experience. A squashing out of joy. A voice so loud it is hard to take in anything else. Watching the clock until the next lot of painkillers. How can there be gifts in that?

Changing a perspective can dramatically alter a photograph or a painting. It can make it sing. An artist’s eye is always scanning for perspective. As a keen photographer and artist I am used to doing that almost without thinking. Changing perspectives on painful and challenging circumstances can be a whole different ball game, but it is a vital, life-giving skill to hone.

I am facing an uncertain future.. I wrote those words to a wonderful, gifted author whose latest book is resonating deeply with me at this time of transition. (Called Apothecary by the Sea – a year in an Orkney garden by Victoria Bennett, I can’t recommend it highly enough! ) As I wrote the phrase ‘an uncertain future’, I realised how ridiculous I sounded. All of our futures are uncertain, we just think we can be sure of tomorrow/next week / next year and take our health and working bodies for granted until they stop or break.

My particular uncertainties revolve around the outcome of this operation on my dominant wrist. What sort of movement and strength can I expect to recover? I am a passionate gardener, an artist who loves to play with paint, a volunteer massage therapist at my local hospice and a joyful grandmother of two, soon to be three. All of these and more need two working hands. At this early stage, neither my surgeon or my physio can give me a clear picture of how I will be. Everyone is different, and my particular situation has some unique challenges.

Naturally I have been doing a lot of reflecting. Severe pain and physical limitations will do that. Trying to get my head around the uncertainties involved. It has lived rent free in my head for too long, and I am an impatient evictor. The whole process has been a lesson in patience, waiting for appointments/having cancellations etc, and I am not sure it is a lesson I have learned very well. Patience comes hard.

Learning to do everything with my left hand has been an interesting new sport. (I challenged my 7 year old granddaughter on a sleepover to get dressed/ undressed with just her left hand. Not only can she contort her lithe little body into positions I couldn’t attempt in the dressing process .. but we discovered she is probably more ambidextrous than I am. It was a fun experiment.

A few days later I had a yearning to pick up a paintbrush again. I had mastered the art of one handed photography from the get go, but could I paint with my left hand? I thought it was time to find out, and spent a happy hour or two playing with oil paint. It turns out my brain can cope with a left hand, and more importantly it was the joy it always has been, left or right.

Everything has been a reorganisation of thinking. How can I do this differently? What can I use to make it work? Over and over, rethinking things I never usually had to think about. That is good for the brain’s plasticity and can definitely be counted as gift.

I had seen that as a short term challenge as I negotiate various permutations of mediaeval type splints (even my physio agrees with my description of them) and slings. What can I wear that fits? How do I get my unwieldy limb into tops, coats or jumpers? But lately I have realised it is a frame of mind I need to keep as gift.

Whatever the outcome, and no matter how much physio I do my right arm cannot go back to what it was. It will inevitably be weaker and less flexible than it was. (Hopefully it will be less painful) So I need to change perspective. Unwrap the gift of discovery.

How do I do things differently? How do I continue to do the things that give me joy? I am going to have to think laterally, and daily/ hourly workout different approaches to every day tasks, just as I have been doing. Keep rewiring my brain and not just between right and left.

Keep a child’s willingness to try and fail and try again. A pliant heart and brain willing to experiment and discover. To look at things from new angles, even if it means kneeling down.