Different facets of the same person..? 15 3 12 (12) 25 1 23

It's endlessly interesting to me that throughout our lives in a sense we become different people and if you read or have read William Shakespeare's seven ages of man speech delivered by Jacques in “As You Like It” you will understand why...

But the difficulty for many of us is to remember these different people we become or have been in order to reap the full benefit of their experiences...

Like one meeting in my life I like to recall was when I was arguably at the height of my powers aged 35 when I at last landed the job I had unwittingly been preparing myself for, for the past 20 years, that of Research and Development Manager in a group of Paper Making companies, and I met this new colleague an `old guy of 54´ who looked every inch his age from the sagging jowls and hanging pot belly to his thinning hair on top, but who then proceeded to get younger every day until close to his early retirement 11 years later, making way for younger blood, he was still no older than the day we met whilst I had aged I felt appreciably in the intervening years.

I have talked before about this phenomenon and even on one occasion looked at life expectancy in Shakespeare's day to shed further light on the guy's insightfulness despite his tender years when he wrote the speech for Jacques, only to be reminded that 450 years ago men lived much shorter lives.

So today it is easy to forget about all the modern remedies we have for extending one’s life staying youthful beyond one's years and so on... But these expressions "You are what you eat" for example have never been truer than they are today: all the vitamins we get to take whether by pill or by eating the fruit of say an orange, etc…

I was reminded about these phenomena yesterday when I bumped into our off-duty post mistress who many years ago had said I reminded her of her father who had died prematurely some years before that, but now sitting in the warm spring sun with a girl-friend chatting and upon my arrival if not before discussing even warmer days she had just experienced in Morocco where she had spent a week’s break… Well I enjoined how I had also travelled to these same warm climes, mentioning also Turkey, Spain, Cyprus and so on but how I personally was not overly fond of some such countries where it is impossible to ask the price of something without an interminably long ensuing discussion, to which her friend also related, but who let slip there were other more important considerations..!?

During this same discussion, as we progressed from subject to subject switching languages in and out of English and the local Scandinavian I could tell by the end of it that this girl friend had me in a much younger age group than the one to which I rightly belong, concluding as I did by saying I have lived so long here I can no longer take compliments for my knowledge of the local language, her surprise being expressed when I alluded to a time before she was born… and as I continued my journey, for my swim in the sea before heading for home, got to reflect on all the adjuncts to preserving one’s youthfulness I have had the good fortune to get whilst at the same time applauding the immediacy of contact through face-to-face meetings of people, as opposed to meetings via correspondence or telephone even, wherein the full thrust of one’s personality is brought to bear…Have a good day everyone as I hope you too can relate to some of the things we touched on this day..?