Being 80

I will be 80 next week. Every day I think about the increasing odds that I won’t be here tomorrow. That fact isn’t difficult to deal with. The uncertainty of “how” is. This is the 16^th year of living alone & learning to cope with life. I value my independence. I value my own routine. I don’t want to have to rely on someone else unless absolutely necessary.

My daughter & her family live a few minutes away, but they all have busy lives. Currently its been 9 days since I have seen or spoken to any of them. I understand that. I experienced it all myself – a profession, a family, & a social life takes time & effort. But it is hard to feel that you are “out of sight & out of mind” of those closest to you.

Living to this age makes me realise that I could have done better myself with my parents & in laws. But that self knowledge only comes with age & experience. My husband & I had a difficult relationship with both my parents & his. The generation gap between us was huge. The generation gap now between me & my family is equally huge. “T’was ever thus” – (Dickens “Old Curiosity Shop”).

I don’t believe, as my mother did, & I suspect my mother in law did, that a child owes their parent a debt of gratitude & has responsibility for them in their old age or infirmity. Parents choose to have children & do owe them care & protection that does last a lifetime. Separation of children from their parents as they enter adulthood is normal & important. That is hard for parents to cope with. Some never let go.

I don’t believe that you can force your children & grandchildren to love & respect you. They have to want to love you & care for you. They have to want to know what you have been doing & how you are. They have to want to visit you or phone & chat. A WhatsApp or text isn't the same.

In my view when we are young adults we are self absorbed. We are time poor. We have to balance a job, running a home, a life & relationships. We compartmentalise & often prioritise ourselves & what we want or our immediate family & friends demand. We might sympathise with other peoples lives & problems but we are unable to fully empathise with situations we have not experienced.

When you are old your perspectives change. If you are thoughtful & introspective you gain insight with a lifetime of experience.

The reality of being alone at 80 is that I could have an accident, a stroke or a heart attack at any time. I could die peacefully in my sleep or I could be in pain. When that happens I could be alone in the house & no one would know. Possibly for days or even weeks. It happened to my mother in law.

Hopefully the probability is small. But I have no way of knowing & there is nothing else I can do to be safer. But I am lucky. I designed, renovated and adapted a home & I wear a tele-alarm. I have good friends who I hope might notice I’m not doing the things I normally do.

But the reality is that its all a gamble. My life could end at any time, (as could yours). So I think it’s important to try to achieve something every day & make living purposeful. We all need to feel it’s worth getting up in the morning.

Shame & Responsibility

I may be wrong, but I don't think I have anything that I need to be hugely ashamed of. That's not to say I'm perfect, far from it. I make mistakes & when I was younger I was far more volatile & emotional about things. But I do tend to think about what I do & say. I also have quite a noisy conscience & inner voice. 

Shame - "a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety"

              "a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute"

              "something that brings censure or reproach - something to be regretted " 

Occasionally eyebrows are raised because I do sometimes swear. For some reason people don't expect an 80 year old to swear. I also probably hold views considered by the "woke" to be politically incorrect. But actually I'm not ashamed of either of those. I don't aspire to perfection. I'm happy with my flaws. 

I am ashamed about some elements of our world today. I'm ashamed of how we have polluted our wonderful planet from the air we breath to the oceans & continents. I'm ashamed of how lacking in any moral compass politics & some international organisations & companies are. It's all very destructive. I am ashamed of how we have allowed inexcusable polarity in wealth & access to basic rights in the peoples of every country. I am ashamed of the current death & destruction perpetrated by countries on innocent victims casually referred to as "collateral damage". 

I do feel resonsible for some of this. I have watched climate change for decades & have contributed to it by my choices. Sometimes unknowingly, but not always. I have been responsible for some of the pollution, again sometimes unknowingly, sometimes not. As I aged & was wealthy enough to travel more worldwide & work in countries like Malawi & Nepal I realised just how fortunate I was. Seeing poverty in places like Yemen, Ethiopia & India makes you realise clearly how much we in the Northern hemisphere take for granted.

Although I was politically active when I was younger, family & work took up most of my life. I didn't do enough. Now I do have time, I'm only physically capable of supporting carefully chosen charities & politically lobbying a lot. The main thing I try to do is act as a primary source & commentator, through this blog. I will never be an influencer, but I do know I am read on Europe, Asia, America & Canada.

I believe the existential threat humanity is facing means that everyone has a responsibility to be well informed & to take action. We should all be ashamed of some of the things that are happening in our world & our lifetime. 

We all need to be brave enough to speak out & say "Not in my name".

  

Choices & Opportunity

I don't make New Year resolutions. I know I will fall by the wayside of good intention.

I do believe that I always have the opportunity to be a better person by making better choices. This can be anything from the food I eat & the amount of exercise I do, to how I behave to other people. It also includes what I spend my time doing, whether it's self based action or action on behalf of others.

There is always a choice. The problem is how difficult that choice might be. For instance I doubt that I am particularly brave. So if I saw someone in danger would I help if it put me in danger too? I don't know until it happens, but I hope I would try. The quid pro quo is that I hope someone would choose to help me in the same situation.

I think we are all self centred in some ways. We choose to do or not do things according to the benefit or loss to ourselves. The important thing is to be aware of that & try to be more empathetic & sympathetic to other people. 

People allow themselves to become motivated by gain in money, prestige, power, & posessions. All of those things cease when we die, except for a small number of people who leave a genuine legacy. Not money or things in their will. A legacy of good choices & opportunity for others.

As I've aged I am more & more aware of what my life legacy might be. Not because I'm religious & believe that St Peter will tot it all up at the pearly gates in order to let me in or lock me out. But because, although I am just a grain of sand in history, I think that everyone's life should mean something. There should be a good outcome from being here.

But I also do believe in Karma. There will be some payment extracted, at some time, for those people who have not made good choices or who have not taken opportunities to be kind or benefit others.

Indoctrination & Cults

I'm reading "The Running Grave" by Robert Galbraith (J K Rowling). It's a huge book, 1200 pages, all about a Cult.

Indoctrination is the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of unshakable beliefs uncritically & often irrationally. We can see evidence of indoctrination in educational institutions, the state, the arts, culture, and the media. People are indoctrinated in many ways;-

• Selective presentation: Presenting only certain facts and ideas to support specific beliefs
• One-sided arguments: Using incomplete or biased arguments
• Suppression of evidence: Deliberately withholding or falsifying evidence
• Emotional slogans: Using impassioned slogans to promote a belief
• Preaching: Using a preaching style instead of teaching

 This is achieved in a variety of ways in cults;-

• Separating new members from their families, friends, and jobs
• Forcing new members to give up their money, belongings, and bodies to the cult
• Compelling new members to marry people they just met
• Using punishment, deprivation, and other tactics to wear down new members

The more I observe what is happening in our country & the world in general, the more concerned I get that people are being manipulated & even indoctrinated by our very sophisticated technological methods of communication. The very fact that the BBC now has to have a department devoted to fact checking & the secret services have the 77th Brigade shows how unreliable the information we are presented with can be. 

I no longer take any information from news media for granted. I certainly distrust social media & the internet in general. I always try to check out my sources of information & look at several. The most important facility I have is my gut reaction to information. If it doesn't walk like a duck & quack like a duck, then it isn't a duck.

But I have the time to do all that. I am well educated & most importantly I tend towards critical disbelief of information that seems "off". The really worrying fact is that quite a lot of people will accept information, however bizarre, at face value. You only have to look at the many 2024 "conspiracy theories" to be seriously concerned;-

• Vaccine efficiency
• October 7th Denial
• Severe weather generated by bad actors
• Trumps assassination attempts a PR stunt
• False narratives about the Israel Hamas war

Worryingly indoctrination does work on some people. If that indoctrination begins in childhood via parents or schools, it can be lethal. It can be really difficult to separate truth from fiction especially for young impressionable minds. False news is everywhere. People with power, money & influence are realising just what they can achieve in our instant news era.

We all should be very aware & very afraid. We all need to value truth.  

 

 

Wishing, Desiring & Having Everything

I'm sure I could think of things my little heart desires. Human beings seem to spend a lot of time wishing they could have something else or do something else. We desire to be someone else, be somewhere else, have someone else in our lives. Seemingly we are never satisfied with what we have already got. Satisfaction seems hard to come by.

Wishing has a long & ancient history. Just think of all the fairy tales for example. Customs & rituals can be traced back to ancient cultures. People believed that wells were home to gods and that throwing coins or other tokens into the water would grant wishes. Some wells were also thought to have healing powers, and people would bathe in or drink the water. The Etruscans, believed that chickens could predict the future and that the "wishbone" of a chicken could be used to make wishes. We make a wish when we blow birthday candles out. 

I am interested in why we humans are never satisfied with what we have got. Apparently a combination of psychological factors including our natural inclination to seek new things, a tendency to compare ourselves to others, high expectations, the "hedonic adaptation" where we quickly adjust to positive changes, and a biological drive to constantly improve and evolve, which can make contentment feel stagnant and unmotivating, all play a part. Essentially, our brains are wired to always be looking for "more" rather than appreciating what we already possess. 

Shopping was the UK's favourite leisure activity. But Covid & online shopping seems to have changed that. It is still enjoyed by 70 - 80% of people according to Statistica. (I'm one of the minority who don't enjoy doing it regularly). There's very little I want that makes shopping worth the effort.

https://www.microbizmag.co.uk/ecommerce-statistics/ - interesting website.

I am tempted to try not to buy any new clothes in 2025. I'm sure I have enough to last the rest of my life, apart from possibly underwear & shoes. (Actually I've got a lot of shoes - Mental note take the ones that don't fit to the charity shop.) 

Similarly, I don't want to buy anything else for the house. I can't resist plants for the garden though.

I actually do think that I have more or less everything I want. There is nothing I really desire. On the contrary, I spend a lot of time trying to have less stuff in my life. Christmas brings this home to me every year. The sheer consumerism of it & the waste that follows from it. 

 

The most important thing about Christmas is who you spend it with. Enjoying the company of your friends & family. It seems easy to lose sight of that. It's easy to lose sight of the many people who don't have anything like everything.

 

 

Dis - Ease

I am not infected with a disease. I am infected with Dis - Ease. 

There is so much happening in my world & the wider world that I do not understand & cannot tolerate. I cannot sit back & ignore it all. I cannot be at ease. 

I have little to complain about in my current life. I am really fortunate. I can afford the cost of living & I have a comfortable home, a lovely family & good friends. 

In a wider sense there are events in the UK that concern me & make me question if my birthplace bears any resemblance to the place I remember from my teens & twenties. Politics & politicians are not respected in the way they were, for good reason. Respect has to be earned through action in the best interests of the country & it's people. 

We seem to have had years of poor decision making in the interests of anyone but the people who vote. Currently I am incensed at our stance on the Israeli war. Keir Starmer defended Israel's "right" to totally cut power and water supplies to Palestinians in Gaza. He didn't explain how collective punishment methods, such as the withdrawal of water & aid supplies to a large urban area, could be done within international law - Completely indefensible collective punishment. I'm also appalled at the whole privatisation mess we are in with the Water companies, Justice system, NHS, Transport.....There has been profligate waste of public money & now the public are literally paying the price. So many special enquiries into lying & obfuscation over the years. So much compensation due to people who were completely let down & deceived.

I'm really not sure I'm proud to be British. However there are worse places to live. Syria for one. The latest in a long line of countries devastated by despotic, greedy, rulers who killed & maimed their own populations & who we failed. Failed because we did not speak out enough & we certainly didn't do much to stop the killing & devastation - Mealy mouthed words & not enough action. There are so many countries where the populations live in dreadful conditions & unsurprisingly want to escape. Our record on refugees & migrants isn't edifying. Suella Braverman called them an "invasion". Where is our humanity?

We don't have effective international organisations to deal with the complex & universal threats to peace & stability. We certainly don't have international organisations to deal with the existential threat of the Climate Emergency. Consensus is prevented by self interested vetos. Compromise is the name of the game.

The only way forward  is to mobilise the power of the people to do the right thing & force good decision making. I'm just not sure that we are able to do that. Human beings are inherently selfish.

Culture & Cultures

Culture - 

the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement collectively.

Cultures -

the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society.

I enjoy the arts - music, literature, paintings & crafts, drama. I love opera & reading & going to exhibitions. So I suppose I am cultured, but have never thought of myself in that way before. I just know these things give me immense enjoyment & develop my thinking. They broaden my horzons & make me realise how varied, creative & talented people are.

When my husband & I retired we travelled a lot to most continents & some very far flung places. My views on holidays & travel have changed now we are in a climate emergency, but I think we did it in a way that actually benefitted local communities rather than big tour companies. I gained a lot from seeing that there are different ways of living & thinking. We were lucky in that we got to interact with local people & listen to their beliefs & opinions. I learned that our way of living, our culture, is not the only one or even the best one.

Human beings are very diverse in every way, but most countries have some sort of code of belief & behaviour that recognises the sanctity of human life & allows for great individual divergence. For some that comes through religion, for others it is a simple moral code. 

For a minority they have no such guiding principle. I am truly glad that Assad has been overthrown. It is such a shame that the world stood by knowing what he was doing & did nothing to stop him. I hope that the Syrian people can rebuild the country that I visited 24 years ago. It was a country that was very tolerant of all religions. A country of history, wonderful buildings & fascinating landscapes. Assad & his father are responsible for destroying much of that. I hope that we will remember what went before, rather than the last years under criminal tyrants & their followers.

 

Ummayad mosque Damascus

Ummayad mosque Alleppo before & after

The destruction of buildings & culture is awful, but the destruction of human lives is simply dreadful. Yet again we failed. We should have done more.