My father had a garden.

A large town garden with well-ordered rows and labels on almost every plant. A living garden, slightly wild too, where tomatoes grew alongside beans and strawberries spread across a dozen rows.

He was the one who taught me how to find them.

Strawberries don't announce themselves. They are not visible at first glance. They grow close to the ground, hidden beneath their leaves, quiet and patient until you know exactly where to look. And when you find them, they are there, ripe, perfect, waiting for you all along.

I was six years old. I had no idea that image would travel with me for the rest of my life.

Six decades later

I have lived in 20 countries. I have been through breakups, illness, uprootings, and rebuildings. I have made mistakes I would not make again, and choices I am still proud of today.

And for a long time, I looked at all of it as a sequence of events, things that had happened to me, that I had survived or recovered from.

It was only in my fifties, during a training with Indigenous Canadians where I stepped into a virtual canoe, that I began to see things differently.

Every difficult experience contains a lesson. It is there, hidden beneath the leaves. You just need to crouch down, look closely, and have the patience to search.

That is exactly what my father had taught me to do with strawberries.

What this book is - and what it is not

The Strawberry Wisdom is a six-volume series. One volume per decade of life, from childhood to my fifties.

Each volume follows the same thread: I tell a lived experience, I distil the lesson it holds, and I ask you a reflective question. Not to give you ready-made answers, but to help you find your own.

This is not a classic self-help book. It is not an ordinary autobiography either. It sits somewhere between the two, a narrative that works as a tool.

I write for people who sense that their hardest experiences hold something precious, but who don't yet have the words to name it.

This week's question

What is the hardest experience of your life, and what lesson was hidden inside it?

Write it in the comments. I read everything.

Elisabeth Court, known as Babette
Author of The Strawberry Wisdom