Dear LPG,

So many of us these days put the radio or television on just to keep us company.  I often have one or the other on in the background without really listening to what is going on, but this morning, the phrase ‘live and let live’ seemed to register with me although I can’t even tell you in what context it was mentioned.

For some reason, my reaction, was to think about why my siblings and I, as old as we all are, are so different even though we were brought up by the same parents and with the same principles.  I suppose that I am talking about the differences in the rules and values that each of us have decided that we must live by. 

I think that most people develop their own personal life code even if they have never found the time to think about exactly what they are.  I don’t think that we are born with them although I think that a lot of them are developed very early in life while our parents are teaching us the basics (language and communication, cleanliness and the social codes that we live by, and the cultural principles that end up governing our lives). 

But I think that the differences between these personal life rules, and the ones that the majority of us take as read, is that they are the result of our personal assessment of all the things that we are taught by our parents and the others who shape those earliest influences in our lives.

I used to think it was all about the time-factor; the fact that everything around us evolves.   When we take the time to really think about it, the differences surrounding how we live now and what life was like when we oldies were young is sobering.  I know that, to most of the people I knew when I was young, the thought of having a telephone that you could put in your pocket, read the daily news on, watch films on and which would be able to keep a record of where you have been and when you went there was unfathomable.  Yet the youngsters of today take such realities for granted because, for them, such gadgets have always existed.

We used to live in a world where the edict ‘live and let live’ was a very good one to live by for the vast majority of us, but we now live in a world that, in so many ways, moves at a much faster pace where the results of what each of us do and say becomes so much more public.  

So perhaps even those of us who have not felt the need to set ourselves up as politicians and world innovators have a responsibility to do more than just ‘live and let live’.

RB, Brockley