What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
I was strangely moved by a story our minister told recently. He had spoken with a 97-year-old man who had lived an extraordinary public life. He was a highly decorated naval officer, had served in several wars, and had eventually risen to senior leadership. A new naval vessel was even named in his honour. And yet he said, “I haven’t spoken to someone for two weeks that I haven’t paid to speak to me.” That sentence stayed with me.
What remains when work, status and public usefulness have largely disappeared? For much of our lives, work gives us identity, structure and contact with other people. We are needed. People ask for our opinion. They seek our help. Our calendars fill. We carry responsibilities that make us visible. Then, slowly or suddenly, much of that falls away.
Ageing can make people invisible. Titles recede. Achievements move into the background. Other people take over the roles we once occupied. That does not make those achievements meaningless. It simply means their significance cannot depend on being remembered.
So here is my best advice: build a life where you won’t eventually have to ask, “What was all that about?” The aim is not to build a life impressive enough that everyone else remembers it.
The deeper hope is that we ourselves know what our life was about. That we gave ourselves to work worth doing. That we loved people well. That we acted generously when we could. That we stood for something beyond ourselves.
So the best advice to someone younger is this: decide early what makes life worth living, then organise your money, work, ambition, relationships and time around that answer.
And make sure your answer includes people. Because eventually work ends. Status fades. Public usefulness diminishes. What remains is the life we have given ourselves to, the people with whom we shared it, and the quiet knowledge, deep within us, of what it was all about.
The Afterword 
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