The trouble with life is that it can’t be controlled. It’s not a good student. It’s a naughty one. Despite our best intentions, it often does what it wants. It loves to make its own plans for us.

So it’s a bad idea to try to impose law and order on your life, to try to rule it with a clenched iron fist. It’s better, instead, to stay open to learning, to keep growing in the direction that matters to you.

It’s healthy to want to improve but, the older you get, the more you realise that transformation doesn’t come with a crash and bang. The winds of change don’t blow in like a hurricane, they’re more like a breeze.

Transformation happens in slow degrees. Progress comes with persistence, it comes gently. And it can spread: One person’s transformation can spill out into the world.