Seventy Springs

"It's better to have had your wish than to have wished you had,"


sings the dead, dancing Grandfather in Woody Allen's underrated 1996 musical-comedy Everyone Says I Love You. And it's true. We all must take our lives back. We've sold them for cheap distractions and split, incongruous minds. Since when did employers call the shots? I am certain that employees had rights once upon a time; employers would be in need of help, so they would employ people. Now people are so in need of jobs that the employers have the upper hand. If we all renounced the desire for a third television, a second car, an expensive flat and clothes for our animals (all of which are as unnecessary as each other), then we could regain that power over our own lives.


We can all have what we want much easier if we stop pretending that we "need" these unnecessary things. Regrets are much harder to deal with when we regret what we didn't do. At least if we do it, even if we regret it, we know we tried. It's better to have had your wish than to have wished you had. Mr Housman says:


Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.


And, surely, this is all that is worth knowing.


Lovely to see you again, reader. Do keep stopping by.
Mike.xx