Once upon a time a man told me that he had gone ahead and married his wife, even though he knew he didn't love her.
'But why?' I asked, mystified, for surely living with someone you are not in love with is the hardest thing in the world.
He looked straight at me and then said levelly, 'Because it wasn't important.'
I gasped; I distinctly remember gasping, even though I had long moved in a world of arranged marriages, where love, if it came, was a big fat bonus.
But this man was not part of such a world.
Much later, a Catholic friend and I were discussing the matter of justice. She made the point that justice does prevail, if not in this world, in the next: she is a firm believer in God as Judge, while I am not. Neither do I know my way through theological mazes: what I do know, however, is that I want justice here and now and not in the sweet by-and-by. So I had a question: 'Do you believe God considers we are as important as all that?'
Her answer was a resounding, unequivocal Yes, and I was reminded once more of the biblical notion that God heeds every sparrow that falls, and also of the accompanying assertion that we humans are of rather more value than the average sparrow in any case.
We do not guess this when we are young, but our idea of what is important changes over time, and so the man who married heedlessly and in haste eventually realised that his decision had been important, after all: regret, I think, figured largely in his learning, but then regret is so often part of learning and ageing.
Perhaps one of the few advantages of the latter process is that we have an opportunity to re-organise our priorities. And so we ask ourselves the question: How important is it? Finding an answer is invariably difficult. Of course it is. But we learn to shed the little things. Eventually. Usually.
Recently I decided I simply had to go to England, after a gap of nine years: I felt compelled to see three of my girlfriends. I use the word girl advisedly, though, for they are aged 94, 90 and 86. I felt it important to visit them before it was too late; it is important to them to meet extreme old age with courage,