I was in a café with my mum this weekend. It was crowded so a couple at a table made space for us to sit down. We ordered tea and cake and began to talk. The couple next to us carried on with their conversation. Talking to someone with Alzheimer’s, as many will know, can be a bit like walking in circles; no matter where you begin, or how extraordinary the landscape, you come back round to the place you started. And then you begin again. The same first stride, the next as it was before, landscape unchanged, the horizon reaching only so far as the place you started from.

My mum and I were doing this walk, one we had taken many times previously and will return to again, when the couple next to us began to gather their things to leave. I glanced at the man and saw that there was something in his face I recognised. I couldn’t locate from where, but I knew I had seen the expression on another face at another time. He stood up and I did too, to let him pass.  I was about to sit back down when he stopped and turned to me. “You are not alone in this.” He said. Without thinking I reached out and we hugged. No one said anything afterwards and he left.

My mother was astonished. I told her I’d pulled, and we laughed about it. Inside I wanted to cry. Not because it was sad, but because that stranger and I had shared an understanding and in that moment of connection we saw each other, we recognised in each other a fellow walker of circles. It was simple and it was powerful.

E.M. Forster wrote in his novel Howards Way, ‘Only connect.’ That moment of connection with the man in the café was more bolstering than any words of comfort I had heard concerning my mother’s illness. Forster is encouraging the reader to connect with themselves too. To connect thought and feeling to become whole and congruent. That is what coaching aims to do. To hear without judgement, to regard with empathy, to provide the space to join up the thoughts and the feelings in order to find the way forward. I feel privileged to be on that journey with my clients and we aren’t walking in circles. We are finding the connections that sustain us all as human beings.