Too much is spoken about illness and medical procedures, too much read into
every twitch as sand gathers in the hourglass base.
We sit sipping coffee, mine black for its antioxidant properties, beside young
mothers sitting at the next table, prams parked beside their chairs and their babies
in their arms, babies wrapped against the autumn breeze in the café courtyard.
They are fashionable women, attractive, wearing stylish black and grey,
highlighting the white of their breasts as they bare them to feed their babies only
weeks old. I am distracted from our talk of travel insurance and such hiccups of
aging, distracted not as a young man might be by the beauty of these breasts but by
the concept of our lifecycle. Sages are often depicted as old and white-haired with
beards flowing down beyond their thorax. Perhaps I know why, perhaps it takes
time to ponder things objectively, without the surge of blood, without the wind
whistling through wild oats. There’s a lot of ‘perhaps’ in the thinking of an amateur
philosopher. I stand and walk back into the café to order another coffee, just to
break my thinking, just to get back on track.