I had arranged for passenger assistance at Bristol but there wasn’t a spare wheelchair when I arrived over-tired. A young woman already in a wheelchair heard my request and offered me hers, which I gratefully declined. After a few minutes a wheelchair had been found and we were wheeled off together towards a door across a road – partially across the young woman appeared to be having a fit. Help rushed towards her but after just a minute or two she seemed fine again and we were wheeled to the next departure door and placed next to each other. I expressed empathy for what had happened: it turned out that the year before, she had lost her 17 year old son and ever since then, had had these violent physical attacks. Feeling a surge of pain knowing the loss of a child, I held her hand and she wept. I felt very close to her and when she asked my name, I just began to reply when she exclaimed “I thought so!” Bewildered I asked why and she told me her name. That was when we were both crying; she brought back thirty years ago to me, when, for four years, she had been a pupil in my class at Moray Steiner School.

(a very similar blessing occurred for me the day we were allowed to mix and talk after nine days of silent meditation called Vipassana; A tall young 21 year-old student of homeopathy I had been conversing with, turned out to have been the six-year old freckle-faced child, one of five similar, who made my first experience of Waldorf education at the South-West London Waldorf School in 1984-5! I saw in his face something familiar and he in mine (I was now 60)!

All those children are part of me and are also special, every one.