Do you remember your first time?

Don’t be cheeky! I don’t mean THAT first time only – I mean all the other ones too. By the time you reach half a century (as I have a number of years ago), there have been plenty of first times – memorable, regrettable, exciting, boring, delicious, unpleasant and many more besides. And what’s likely to keep me young at heart for the next fifty years is plenty more First Times on a regular basis.

Let’s face it; despite our inbuilt resistance to change, life becomes pretty mundane if every day stays familiar and the same. So we learn to navigate our own need for balance between the familiar and the new so life stays fresh but manageable.

So what first times do you remember?

Is the memory hazy and unclear – perhaps of your first day at school?

Or maybe it’s a time filled with excitement and that frisson of risk – your first disco? your first kiss? your first date?

Perhaps it’s a memory filled with terror and fear- the first time you cycled a bike, spoke in public or did that parachute jump?

First Time…On a motorbike!

Sometimes our first times signify major personal milestones – the first time you stood up to the bully at school or in work?

Hopefully, we can all remember the first time we had sex and the first time we made love. If we were lucky, it was the same time.

Some First Times You Might Want to Forget…

First times can terrify and immobilise us yet nothing can progress without them. We can never become proficient or even skilled in any task without starting for the first time. So let’s make friends with the first times to come. Bring them on, I say!

Otherwise, we face a future with no more new adventures, no passions as yet untapped and  no more Give It A Try moments.

I’m not ready for hibernation yet. I still have too many memories to make. xx