The Practice of Showing Up

There is a small room in Marie Curie Hospice on Marsh Lane in Solihull that is used the same way, twice a month.

People walk in. The room is ready. They sit down. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes someone has good news. Sometimes someone has none.

A couple of hours later, they walk out.

There is no curriculum. There is no syllabus. There is no homework.

There is only the showing up.

A lot of modern culture is organised around the idea that important change happens through intensity.

The breakthrough. The transformation. The before and after. The retreat that changed someone's life. The book that broke them open. The moment of clarity that arrived all at once and made everything different.

These moments do happen. They are not nothing.

But what works in cancer support — what people who have walked it tell us has actually helped — looks much more like turning up to the same room, on the same day, over a long stretch of time. Not all at once. Not brilliantly. Just consistently.

Anne Lamott put it in Bird by Bird: when something is overwhelming, you do the only thing you can do, which is the next small thing. Bird by bird. The advice was about writing. It applies more broadly than that.

The Japanese word shokunin is often used for the craftsperson's devotion to steady work, refined through repetition.

The recovery community knows it. They are explicit about why daily meetings matter more than insight does.

Monks know it. Musicians know it. Marriages that last know it.

The Solihull group, kept going by a small group of volunteers, has been doing it twice a month without making any fuss about it.

A note in passing.

I have not had cancer. This is written from speaking, spending time alongside people who have. The voices that matter most are at the end of this piece.

Part of why this kind of practice is rare now is that it asks for the one thing the modern world is structured against — the slow accumulation of relationship with the same people, in the same place, over a length of time none of us think we have.

People move. They change jobs. They swap WhatsApp groups. They unfollow.

The ground of long acquaintance — the kind where you can walk in without explaining yourself, where someone notices you have cut your hair, where the person next to you remembers what you were going through six months ago and asks how it turned out — that ground has been slowly disappearing for a long time.

Which is why a group that keeps opening the room, with broadly the same spirit over many years, is not a nostalgia object. It is a small piece of social infrastructure of a kind that has become harder to build.

It cannot be manufactured in a weekend retreat. It cannot be branded.

It can only be opened, week after week, with someone there to make sure the room is ready.

The first time someone goes to a meeting like this, the practice does not look like a practice.

It looks like a few people sitting together in an ordinary room.

It is, in fact, a piece of slow-built community that the person is quietly being absorbed into. The change is invisible at first. Around the sixth visit, or the tenth, something starts to surface. Someone remembers a name. The long version of why you are there is no longer required. Three different people look up when you walk in tonight and register that you are a little quieter than usual.

That is the practice.

The practice is the slow making of a place where you no longer have to explain yourself.

This is a stranger thing in adult life than we give it credit for. Most rooms we enter as adults — work meetings, school pickups, GP waiting rooms, even many family gatherings — require us to perform a version of ourselves that other people can read quickly.

A long-running cancer support group is one of the very few adult rooms left in which the performance is allowed to drop.

That dropping, repeated, is what people often describe afterwards as the part that helped.

A small principle runs through almost all writing about long practice — across music, recovery, religious tradition, marriage, monastic life. It is something like this:

You do not have to do it brilliantly. You only have to keep doing it.

This is the opposite of how most of us are taught to relate to anything in adult life. We are taught to do things brilliantly or not at all. We are taught that consistency is for the boring. We are taught that depth comes from intensity rather than from time.

Then something serious happens — we are ill, or someone we love is, or someone we love has died — and many people discover, often late, that the people who can hold them are not the people who showed up brilliantly once. They are the people who showed up unremarkably, many times, over years.

The current room at Marie Curie Hospice is a small example of this principle.

It does not ask anyone to do anything brilliantly. It does not even ask anyone to keep coming. It opens, twice a month, and the people who keep the room ready do not mind in the slightest if someone comes once and never again, or every other Thursday for the next nine years.

The practice is not for the practitioner to perform.

It is for the room to be there.

A small invitation, for anyone reading this who has been wondering whether to come.

You do not have to commit to a programme. You do not have to introduce yourself. You do not have to come back.

You only have to walk in once and see what the room is like when there is nothing required of you. Sit somewhere near the back. Listen, or not. Stay ten minutes, or two hours.

Nobody will assess you. Nobody will advise you. Nobody will sell you anything. Nobody will ask you to fill out a form.

You will be welcomed, quietly, by people who have been doing this small thing for longer than most of the technology we use today has existed.

If, after one visit, you would like to come back — once, three times, every month for the rest of your life — the practice is ready.

The room is open. The second and fourth Thursday at 7.30pm.

That is the whole offer.