The truth about life

By Ian McDonald

At the ripe old age of seventy-five, when one is increasingly aware that it is time to make sense of what has happened in one’s life, I have become convinced about two major things. They illumine the days that pass far too quickly.

The first conviction is simply about life itself – that we have only one life and that it is infinitely precious and that we had better make the best of it in both work and play and in our personal relationships and not always be hankering after greener pastures and sweeter times and easier circumstances and better people.

Charles Baudelaire, the French poet, in his journal wrote that life is a hospital in which each patient believes he will recover if he is moved to another bed. So people imagine a curing of all their ills if only, for instance, they move to a new country or to a new employer or, indeed, to a new government. Unfortunately, it isn’t as easy as that. In the end you are left with yourself, the one bed in which, like it or not, you must always stay.