I figure that most men, when they reach a certain age, ask questions about their lives. Perhaps, like me, they think more and more about the past and less about the present. They try to avoid the future altogether, for the prospect of continued decline is bleak indeed. Which is why I found an article in a Sunday Times magazine entitled :
No time like the present
Clinging to the past and fearing for the future is ruining the here and now, warns Tim Lott
so apposite.
The first point that he made which struck a chord with me is, that we think of the present world merely as the end of the past. ' So it is easy to forget that the past is actually the result of the present. It is the present, not the past which is powerful.'
These are difficult ideas to follow. They seem to turn everything on its head , but the argument says that, the way we are the people we are now explains why our predecessors were the people they were then.
'The present is all there is. It is everything and everywhere. Even our thoughts about the past take place in the present.'
People, he argues are in a hurry. We are in a panic to get as much as possible done ' before it all collapses into nothingness.'
He confesses that at 53 he has 'settled into the present and it is a much more comfortable place to be. In reality, it is the only place to be.'
So I'm asking myself should I, like Tim Lott, try to settle into the present and , difficult though it may be, see Britain today as a place for old men ?
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