What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
“Enjoy yourself while you’re young!”
This was the advice my grandfather gave me when he was in his mid-nineties. I pass it on!
He had started work at fourteen, so I’ve sometimes wondered quite how much youthful enjoyment he himself had managed to fit in.
But I think I understand what he meant now.
It wasn’t an instruction to be idle or indulgent. It was closer to an attitude to life: be happy when you can, and arrange your life so that there are things in it you enjoy doing.
Looking back through my teenage diaries, I can see myself discovering this without knowing that was what I was doing.
At boarding school I was forever busy. Lessons, prep, chapel, rugby, swimming, plays, letters, records, girls, friends, schemes and ambitions all tumble over one another on the pages. Some things I did because I had to. Others I pursued with extraordinary enthusiasm. The distinction matters.
Swimming is an obvious example. Training could be hard and repetitive, yet I loved improving, racing and belonging to that world. Geography was another. I worked at it because I was good at it, but being good at it made me want to work harder. Art, writing, theatre and music kept forcing themselves into my life for much the same reason.
By seventeen and eighteen the pattern became clearer. After years in which much of my life had been organised for me, I had home, swimming, Youth Theatre, friends and a proper girlfriend. Those years remain among the happiest of my youth. I was busy, but increasingly busy with things and people I had chosen.
That may be the advice I would now give someone younger.
Know yourself as early as you can. Notice what gives you energy rather than merely consuming it. Gravitate towards your strengths, though not so narrowly that you never discover new ones. Find work you can enjoy doing well. Spend time with people whose company enlarges your life rather than diminishes it.
And don’t confuse enjoyment with ease. Some of the things I have enjoyed most involved enormous effort. Swimming training hurt. Writing can absorb months. Mountains can be cold, wet and exhausting. Raising children certainly wasn’t an uninterrupted holiday.
The pleasure lies partly in caring about what you are doing.
My grandfather’s sentence has therefore grown larger as I have grown older.
“Enjoy yourself while you’re young” sounds like permission to have fun before the serious business of life begins.
I think he may have meant something better than that.
Enjoy yourself while you’re young — and, if you possibly can, learn how to construct a life in which you can go on enjoying yourself when difficult times develop – they will!
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