Dear LPG

The other day, I was left to read a bedtime story to my young granddaughter.  When I find myself in that position, the secret is to choose one of the old standards; after all, which little girl can say no to a tale about a princess, a fairy and at least one thwarted villain?  I know there will be a happy ending, and when ‘they all lived happily ever after’, it is easier to leave the little ones with happier thoughts when it is time to turn off the lights.

The other day, I noticed how many of those stories included magical wishes.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we each had a magic Aladdin’s lamp? But if we were allowed to have our dreams come true in later life, I wonder how our choices would change.  

I was having one of those thinking sessions recently that are mixed with a tinge of regret, and something occurred to me. It is a good thing that in the real world, most of us have to work for what we want because the choices I would have made even twenty years ago would be so different from the ones I would want to make today. 

When I was younger, I remember wanting to wave a magic wand that would instantly make me rich, famous, beautiful, and successful, even though I was not sure exactly how the realities of those outcomes would play out. Thinking about it now, in my eighth decade of life, most of us would focus on getting rid of our aches and pains before making any other choices.  

There are nearly always three, so I would try to combine all those elements into one big compound wish, leaving me with a desire for my family, friends, and, lastly, the rest of the world. 

I would then turn my focus on improving the quality of life around me, but my thoughts would inevitably be spent agonising over how to get the best out of those two remaining wishes.  

I spent some time wondering how to make one wish work for everyone I include when talking about my friends and family. I would find it hard to pick just one of them to wish for, and how would I be sure I was offering them what they would want for themselves?

I would then turn my focus on making the world a better place, but working out what I could do to make things better left me having an equally hard time.   How can you get the best out of a wish for the world?  I don’t think that I would be able to fit the elimination of climate change, war, famine, natural disasters, bad politics and world poverty all into one wish, and working out which one to choose would be an impossible task and leave me with even more regret.

The other thing to consider is that wishes, both in those stories and in reality, have consequences, and our choices would change many different aspects of our lives. The ultimate wish is to be able to live forever, but when I think about it, that might become boring, too.  

This old version of me wishes that everyone I know, the rest of the world, and I will always be as happy as we can be with   what we already have. 

 Be happy readers… 

AK, Bellingham