I was walking up Priest Hill in Caversham and by St Anne’s Well.
There’s something reassuring about it still being there.
I was in a Caversham coffee shop last week and whoever had put their playlist together included two favorite songs from my youth – which was both pleasing and made me feel old.
I was reading the other day that, by the time of our teenage years, our basic selves are formed. The science is saying that, thereafter, what we really like is what we already know – what we’ve already learned. And we like that personal learned reality to be reinforced as time goes by. This covers everything, from what excites us to what makes us laugh, from the people we rub along well with to the people we don’t much like, the music we like to the kind of things we like to see. And everything else …
Yes, there will be permutations and variations as life goes on and none of this precludes the new from your life. But taking in something new gets harder to do as you age.
With that all in mind, what we’d all be wise to do is actively appreciate ‘our world’ as we’ve learned it, in all its aspects and all its variety – even if ‘all it’s doing’ it is reinforcing the ‘you’ that already exists. That reinforcement is important. What’s more, you never know when what you like might disappear.*
* This quite sobering item from The Conversation looks at how even something as venerable as Stonehenge might be eroded by climate change.
