The great solution to negotiating the ups and downs of life is to be able to chunk up and chunk down at will (as long as you are excellently calibrated as to when to do it of course).
And your growing breadth of experience allows lateral leeway - the leeway of peripheral vision, what you might call worldliness.
These are the qualities that make you exactly who you are today.
And what you are today is what you have been working towards every other day of your life.
Every other second.
But there is a problem with this legacy of adaptability.
That very quality which you may elevate so highly is exactly where the worry seeps in.
You've made an arena for your own mortality.
A canvas for your own anxiety.
And the dark adapted eyes that peek and peer through all the holes and cracks are scrutinising you in your prison.
Perhaps even mockingly.
You may think that you can drink in all the possibilities of life in a single gaze.
After all, age brings wisdom.
You can see the wood for the trees.
But human nature being what it is, it spends a little too much time in the company of the negative and depraved.
It dwells on the shadows, it lingers on the needles, it over-considers the untidy and the dirty and it loses not a wink of sleep should you tread on a pine cone.
The media doesn't really help.
If you turn on your television as an escape but are sufficiently cursed that you find that Sean Lock and Lee Mack aren't your cup of tea, then you have a lot of irritating channel surfing ahead of you to find a channel and a programme you can relax with.
And for god's sake, don't watch the news more than once a week.
So shore up the holes, darn that canvas, resole your walking boots and buy some Cif.
Or all that experience, all that life, all that knowledge won't make you feel so good after all.
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