Phew, this summer’s been exhausting hasn’t it? We hit the ground running with the fantastic Danny Boyle opening ceremony, were caught up in the “Team GB Gold Rush”, Bradley Wiggins and Claire Balding were elevated to national heroes and the sheer exhilaration of watching Usain Bolt, powering his way to two gold medals was fantastic. Just enough time for a quick holiday to recover, and we’re off again with the Paralympics.

I think it is particularly poignant that in the year the Paralympics come home to the country where it all started as rehabilitation of ex servicemen, that there should be so many of today’s service men and women taking part.

To join the armed forces requires a high level of fitness, and the day to day existence is one where you literally put your body on the line both through physical exertion and the very dangerous nature of what it is to be a soldier.

So whilst anyone joining up does so in awareness of the fact that injury or death is a very real possibility, the actuality of the horrific injuries suffered can never be prepared for. We all operate with a system of beliefs which are so ingrained for the main part, that we do not even recognise them, they are just part of who we are. For the majority of us those beliefs include the fact that if I want to move my arm, my body will respond.

Fit men and women who lose limbs and go from able to hugely disabled overnight have this belief system destroyed and the fact that they can rebuild it is what I find so inspiring. It is like learning to live again, but before that process can begin, the very real pain of what has happened has to be faced, and the fact that life will never be the way it was before, has to be accepted.

Vicktor Frank who suvived Auschwvitz knew about suffering, and said that it comes to us all, even those who live otherwise charmed lives, will at some point have to deal with death, both their own, and those of their loved ones.

He argued that acceptance of pain, in whatever form, acknowledging it as a part of life, frees us choose how we respond to it. “every thing can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”.

Concentration camp survivors and injured Paralympians are extreme and very visible cases in point, but examples exist in other realms of life also.

Nigella Lawson for example, (bear with me), she has lost her mother, sister and first husband to cancer, a huge burden to bear, yet she seems to me to be someone who has chosen life, chosen to accept that what she still has is meaningful, and is truly living with what she has.

This process of accepting what is lost and living with what is now is something we all do, be it bereavement, ending of a relationship, moving house, even the birth of a baby, and it is often hard, but always worthwhile.