Establishing Priorities.

When I was much younger and still treading my personal path between the tram lines, I wanted what most people wanted – money and the lifestyle accoutrements it provided. But I occasionally heard older people say that money wasn’t the most important thing in life; good health was at the top of the tree. You could get through most difficulties and still enjoy life as long as you had good health.

I took no notice, of course, because good health is something you take for granted when you’re young. You don’t think about it. You walk and run and lift weights freely, and if you do get some minor injury it’s usually easily fixed. You have the confidence to take on difficult physical tasks because strength, energy and a fully functioning body are there to do with as you please. And, more importantly, you have unquestioning faith in your personal future.

In actual fact, for most of my life I never had money because, although I wanted it, I was never driven to chase it. I did modestly well in the material stakes, but that was all. But as I gradually moved further out from the cultural tram lines and the whole lifestyle and material accoutrements imperative became ever less important, one drawback with this evolving attitude was that money – or rather the lack of it – became a big problem. There came a point in 2009 when I saw no way of functioning even at subsistence level for so much as another month.

And then fate took a hand and began to ease the issue gradually over time, and now I’m perfectly comfortable financially. So cue the irony: Now that money is no longer a worry, I have a growing bag of health issues ranging from the ‘be cautious’ to those which compromise my freedom, menace every aspect of my wellbeing, and even threaten the continuation of life itself. And suddenly I know what those older people meant all those years ago.