There is a well-known trust-building exercise in which a blindfolded person allows a sighted partner to lead them.  It can be a powerful experience to relinquish our visual sense and rely on someone else to take care of us. All too often however the exercise is done in a training room or in the course of a quick excursion into the grounds of a training venue.

Imagine how much more powerful it would be to do this exercise in a genuinely wild place, taking your time and with instructions to your sighted partner not just to lead you around but to bring you into delightful sensory contact with your environment. I was fortunate enough to have this experience (both of leading and being led) in a forest clearing in the Jura mountains a couple of weeks ago.

When blindfolded, I noticed how the temporary loss of my sight accentuated my chronically underused faculties of hearing, touch, taste and smell. Even now, I can clearly recall the pungent fragrance released by a small mushroom brushed by my fingers, the sound of chaffinches chirruping in the treetops, and the precise feel of grass, dry leaves, stones and pine cones under my feet. At the time I was acutely aware of the changing temperature on my skin as my partner led me in and out of the sunlight; I felt the breeze on my cheeks shifting direction as I turned; I developed a different sense of presence as I tried to stretch out my non-visual senses to anticipate proximity with rocks and trees.

Just before my blindfold was removed, I reached out and found myself touching someone’s hands. For a few moments I experienced them as the hands not of another human being but simply those of a fellow primate. Then suddenly I could see again. I looked into the face of the person whose hands I was now holding and laughter came out of our mouths: a sound that we two-leggeds sometimes make when we meet each other in the forest.

To become fully human, says David Abram (in the opening paragraph of his new book Becoming Animal) we must own up to being an animal, a creature of earth. And it is hard to do that with any conviction in the middle of a city – and almost impossible in a hermetically sealed office or hotel room.

Arthur Frank (author of The Wounded Storyteller) writes about the times in our lives when the stories through which we constitute our identity no longer make sense. Illness, bereavement, divorce, redundancy, relocation, falling in love, marriage, parenthood and other major life events can cause us to question the familiar stories we tell ourselves (and others) about who we are. In extreme circumstances we may face what he calls narrative wreckage.

Many of us experience something like this at some point in our lives (I write about my own in Coming Home to Story). At such times our identities are particularly malleable and open to change. The art of storytelling can aid our subsequent healing by helping us find new narratives that enable us to reclaim authorship of our lives and make sense of who we are becoming.

Recently my partner Chris Seeley told me that 500 years ago, the Japanese invented the art of Kintsugi: mending rare and precious porcelain with a special resin mixed with powdered gold so that the repair itself added beauty to the original object. Broken hearts, broken dreams, and broken lives cannot be unbroken but perhaps they can become whole again – and even more beautiful than before.

No, really. Don’t get me started.

What’s the picture?

Well OK, you asked for it.

It’s an allen key (not a crowbar, in case you were wondering about the scale of the image). It is about 4cm long and until very recently – about an hour ago in fact – it lived in a small compartment in my roll-along briefcase. Occasionally it would come out of hiding to tighten the wheel bearings on the briefcase and then return to its familiar home. It is a modest and retiring creature, completely unaware that it is in fact a dangerous weapon.

Fortunately for me and my fellow passengers now flying at 35,000 feet above the earth on a BmiBaby flight from Birmingham to Malaga, its lethal nature was recognised in seconds by the eagle-eyed security operative on the X-Ray machine in Departures.

“It’s a tool, sir. You can’t take tools onto the plane.”

“Really,” I replied. “In what way does this particular tool constitute a danger?”

“It’s a tool. No tools.”

“But this useful little implement has lived in my briefcase for years. It has been on many aeroplanes. It has travelled the globe. Without incident so far as I am aware.”

“No tools.”

It was hopeless. My pleas not to be separated from my little friend fell on deaf ears.  But as I took my seat on the aeroplane, I consoled myself with the grateful realisation that the security operative had saved me from my baser nature. I had forgotten that the allen key was in the bag, but once I knew it was lurking there, he was of course quite right to remove it from my possession.

When you come to think of it, I might easily, in a murderous rage at having to pay £2.50 for paper cup half full of a luke warm liquid that could not even pass for tea in a coffee competition, have forced open the window, reached out and unscrewed the wing.

I might have placed it in the aisle as a barricade and taken a member of the cabin crew hostage behind it. I might have placed it in my open palm and terrified the passengers by showing them that I was armed. I might have hurled it across the cabin, thus creating a severe imbalance in the loading of the plane and caused it to veer into a mountain. Oh yes, its potential for causing death and destruction was nearly limitless.

But what’s this? As I write these very words, there is an announcement over the public address sytem: the pilot’s prosthetic limbs have loosened and fallen off in the recent turbulence; he cannot fly the plane; does anyone have an allen key with them with which to screw the limbs back on and save the day?

I summon the cabin attendant. “I did have one,” I say. “But an eager and efficient security operative confiscated it at the airport on the grounds of safety.”

The attendant laughs wryly. “How ironic.”

“Yes. Isn’t it?” I reply as we plummet towards the ground. “Once the black box has been recovered and they listen to the cockpit recording asking for an allen key the poor man will be writing reports for days. But I expect he will quite enjoy that.”

Under the circumstances, I am surprised that my final thoughts are so benign. Of course he would enjoy writing the reports. That sort of half-assed, pettifogging, literal-minded, dim-witted, jobsworth generally does.