So we sat outside for a little while in the late Afternoon sunshine, thinking about old times actually. I’d already channeled my inner photographer, looking for angles and light, so I’d kind of pre-supposed the joy already.

But it was a solace to sit quietly and think together. Is this situation the right way forward? Are we doing the best thing looking ahead? Dear friends say they’re impressed with our strategy, and it’s true you never know what might lie around the next bend in the road. Good to be prepared for the eventualities we scarcely dare to contemplate, without wallowing in them, somehow.

I was that pleased with my eventual take on the new VisualVerse.org stimulus for this month. I developed a combination of memoir and imagination, after thinking about the image over the course of a day, and then the words just flowed out. I was hard pressed to go back to edit after thirty minutes of composing, but of course it was better by the time I had, and still with a dozen minutes to spare within the hour’s effort I clicked the ‘submit’ button. Submitters never know if their piece has been well received until they see, or they don’t, the published material, but for this exercise I was delighted to remember the wanton escapades of my youth and to contrast them with the cautious enthusiasm of my older age. So the brief has been achieved, as far as I’m concerned. That accomplishment brought some joy to the late afternoon sun worship.

Oops, I forgot the time I fell asleep on the Northern Line, travelling to the final destination, on the last train of the night, and had to spend the rest of the dark hours scrunched first in a telephone box, and then in an abandoned car like a vagrant. Not the most salubrious of youthful exercises! From the perspective of age, I have to shake my head in disdain at the indiscretions of my younger days. But perhaps those adventures have helped to inform my current outlook on life, and are even now keeping me safe(r).

So the gentle relaxation in the sunshine encouraged us both to accommodate to our changing lives, and to think calmly ahead to future equanimity. There’s a certain joy in growing older that comes with accumulated experience, I guess, though even now I’d hesitate to call it wisdom. Perhaps you could call it something like a heightened perception of what was, what wasn’t, what is, what isn’t, and what might or might not be.

Hmmm, interesting.