You’re never too old for a paradigm shift. Are all such changes positive? Ceasing to believe the world had edges, over which the hubristic sailor might plummet, represents progress, no? Then again, greenhouse gases mightn’t have gathered over a flat Earth.
This adaptation, I’m sure of though. Previously, a celebration was a rare thing, occasioned by rites of passage, birthdays, weddings, achievements. More recently, I experience the celebratory mindset quietly, but daily, if not hourly. To what do I owe this reorientation? A mixture of mortality, memory and experience.
Long before their earliest imaginable retirement, several of my brave and funny school friends lay cold in the ground. You’d have to be possessed of a very brazen exceptionalism to continue to greet every new, healthy day as birthright rather than bonus. Initially, this mindset required a triumph of will over memory, but now feels like a long lost Guardian Angel. You’re much less likely to squander a day you view as a gift than one which feels merely like one of many more.
And what do I remember of departed friends? Kindness dwarfs everything. Their bequest is to make me wish I were more like them; to be determined to make it so; and vocally to appreciate surviving friends.
The older I get, the more frequent and prominent childhood memories become. Running back into the house from playing in the street, I’d hear my mother’s voice as I slaked my thirst. For whatever reason, she felt keenly, and exhorted us to appreciate the miracle of clean, running tap-water. This appreciation has lived within me for five more decades.
And the more that childhood memories ambush me, the more I realise that I’ve not known a moment’s hunger that wasn’t enjoyable, based as it was on joyous exertion or anticipation of an approaching plate. How many thousands of timely meals must my parents have provided?
As if the wars of the world were not sufficient for the task, lockdowns have made us all the more aware of the material fragility of comfortable society. I don’t simply mean those unnecessarily empty shelves of March 2020 but, for example, much reduced access to toilets when out for exercise. And it doesn’t take a huge extrapolation from this to make you feel for refugees and the homeless when, returning to a warm, dry home after a sudden downpour, you can quickly reach for clean, dry clothes. I have to be swept up in a whirlwind of distraction before failing to acknowledge this daily luxury.
I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that the Brexit/Trump moment led to another paradigm shift: the abandonment of belief in slow, if steady, human progress and the reluctant embrace of a more “wheel of fortune” way of apprehending the world. Even though my personal circumstances have not (yet) worsened, the fact that social media brims with misogyny and racism deflates me daily.
The spectre of worsening times comes with associated guilt: that my generation – the generation of paid university fees, student grants, near certain employment, decades of peace – has left current and coming generations with few such assurances. Miraculously, teens now seem to behave better than my own generation, and we had little, apart from pending nuclear destruction, to noise us up.
When awakened from troubled dreams in the night, I lull myself back to sleep by e-reading on very low light settings, to avoid disturbing my wife. The quiet of the night sometimes brings to mind those in prison, perhaps wrongly convicted or silenced by tyrants the world over. I picture them with neither light nor books and kept from disturbed sleep by loneliness, resentment and worry for loved ones. I then feel incredibly lucky for the time and place of my birth and the subsequent run of luck.
And so, these days, I recast Robert Eliot’s much quoted phrase, “don’t sweat the small stuff” and remind myself daily to “celebrate the small stuff”.