Fifteen years ago today, at 00.15 in the morning to be precise, I received the gift of life from someone I have never met and can never thank.
To celebrate my 15th second birthday, I’ve put together this brief list of 15 things I’ve learned over the last 15 years. It is far from comprehensive, but it’s a start.
- People are good more often than they are bad. If you spend too much time on social media, you will come to believe the opposite. Don’t.
- My nieces and nephews have grown, or are growing, into wonderful people. In 15 years I have met three nieces and two nephews who wouldn’t know who I was other than from the stories my family told them, and I’ve seen the other five become adults.
- If you think you’re immune to hangovers, it’s a good idea not to test the theory too strongly.
- Long-term, loving relationships are indescribably precious. They take work, they take patience, they take kindness and they take a willingness to open your heart in a way that you know would all but kill you if it was betrayed, but they will repay your commitment more times over than you can ever imagine.
- Kindness always wins.
- Children have the best outlook on life. You will learn more from spending an hour in the company of a five year old than 10 years in pursuit of the meaning of life. What matters most to any five year old is what they are doing at the specific moment you encounter them; they have no concept of or care for the future. More than that, their imagination runs free and utterly wild. They can take themselves to the furthest reaches of the absurd or the most mundane of the domestic, but they will love their journeys.
- Related: our greatest sin is to dampen a child’s imagination and teach them it’s wrong to embrace it.
- Read more. Ideally more than Twitter and Facebook.
- Learn to think for yourself, to be able to acknowledge the path that others have laid out, but still to explore ideas for yourself.
- Never believe the source of a quote unless you’ve researched it yourself. There are two quotes from Abraham Lincoln that I love: “Never believe everything you read on the internet.”1 and “That would have been very good if I had said it, but I reckon it was charged to me to give it currency.”2
- Finding good coffee is harder than you think, but once you’ve tasted it everything else tastes like mud.
- Clichés are only clichés because they contain truth. Don’t simply dismiss them, but examine them instead.3
- Paris is an incomparable city, Kauai is an incomparable island and Hungary is an incomparable country.
- Embrace your heritage, whatever it is. I’m three-quarters English and a quarter Scottish, which means I have a wild temper but I’m too polite to do anything about it. I love both of the countries that I’m from and I’m proud to be British (even if I’m not proud of some of the things that we have done in the name of empire or progress).
- The most important thing in life is gratitude. We all have something to be grateful for, even if sometimes it can feel like we’re drowning in our troubles. Look for the one thing each day you can say you’re grateful to have in your life, whether that’s a roof over your head, a loving partner at your side, a pet, Netflix, food on your plate or even – if you’re really stretched – Twitter.