BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: The Unassuming Life of Simon Barrington-Ward

How to live a joy filled life

I am thrilled to announce that a chapter of my new book, The Unassuming Life of Simon Barrington-Ward, will be published here every week on Substack!

This book, I hope, will help you navigate life through the twists and turns and darkness that the journey can throw up. I pray it will help you find, behind it all, a thin veil that leads, to light, hope, joy and above all everlasting love. Beyond the darkness, there is light.

Each week is a lesson on how to ‘fail towards’ love…and one more chapter in the life of someone who helped me on my journey to get there, a path I am still trying to walk.

For those who wish to support my work with their money as well as time, which is wonderful of you to do, I have included an audible version of each chapter too. Every week usually on a Wednesday, I will add a fresh chapter to the story until we reach the journey’s end.

For those,who cannot for whatever reason give more than their time to read my musings, which is also very precious and greatly appreciated, I will continue to send positive thoughts every week on the weekends or Monday morning, as a rebellious act against the torrent of dark news we receive on a weekly, daily, hourly basis. I hope it will help with letting the light in.

Be Blessed! x

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CHAPTER ONE: Seeing life through rose tinted glasses…

This is not meant to be a biography in the traditional sense. This is meant to be a collection of musings and reflections of one person who was so impacted by this man, that their career path changed, that their way of life was, in many ways, profoundly influenced by this person’s existence and continues to be so.

It is my hope that after you’ve read this book, your life will be influenced too— that you will, with me, try to ‘fail towards love’ and, in so doing so, discover what it means to be truly alive.

If you don’t know what that means, read on…If you do, read on anyway! This is for anyone and everyone who wishes to be inspired by what is before, above, and beyond us.

So, to start with, my ‘relentless optimism’, as one of my friends called it, stems from this man. It was his unassuming loving and, at the last, his ‘holy’ presence that profoundly shaped and still continues to shape my life.

It is a story told from my own perspective, not my sister’s, nor my mother’s, nor even from other family and friends’ perspectives who also knew him well. So, within the errors of memory that we all have, this is an un-ashamedly rose-tinted view from which grew my own life, my own quest, the journey I am still on: to ‘fail towards love’ and to encourage others around me to do the same. It all springs from this man.

This book is here to encourage others—no matter how far back they may feel—to embark on the same quest: to birth joy in their lives, no matter what circumstances they are in, or will face in the future. My hope is that hope itself will well within you will be the end of this book, inspiring you to live a life of love and hope and well joy, no matter what comes. For that is what this man taught me to live for: a life of faith, a belief in the everlasting never-giving up love that surrounds us all.

Who was this man? Or who is he? Well, the man in question is my father.