Who likes a little flutter on the Grand National? I’m aware that for some people, horse racing is a cruel sport and should be banned, but this is for the purposes of example only. Even people who don’t normally bet, will lay a fiver out on the favourite, or the grey, or the one they just like the name of. But nobody knows who will win, and that’s the thrill. If you knew, there wouldn’t be any fun in it at all.

I confess that the gambling gene has passed me by. If I lay a bet on a horse, it ruins the race for me, because I’m only watching that one horse. I like to watch other people play at roulette, but it’s not for me.

The stock market is another area where we cannot predict the future, although thousands of people make a living by attempting to do just that. There is a reason, however, that that all advertisements for investments say that prices can go down as well as up and you may not get your money back. Nobody can predict the future. Nobody predicted Covid, for instance, and it threw the world into disarray. We’re still recovering from it. What is worse, nobody seems to have learned from it; if another pandemic happened next year, I don’t think we would be any better prepared than we were in 2020.

A friend of mine has a daughter in her early twenties. This young woman has been debating the wisdom of buying lifetime membership of the National Trust. The price is the cost of twenty years’ subscription, and she was trying to decide whether it was worth it. She can afford it, as she has a good job, but that wasn’t the point for her.

“But I might go abroad and not be able to use it,” she said. “Will the National Trust honour it for twenty years? Will it even exist in twenty years’ time? I could even die before I’ve received the full benefit!”

I couldn’t begin to advise her. Personally, I think, if you regularly go to National Trust properties, then lifetime membership is a good thing. My husband and I invested in it when we reached sixty, as it became a lot cheaper then. We took the view that we certainly intend to live until we’re at least eighty – and in good health too. We acknowledge that we might not; something terrible may happen tomorrow - but that’s the future, and we can’t predict it; we can only decide based on intentions and the best knowledge at the time.

What decisions are you facing that will affect your future when you don’t know what the future will hold? Perhaps we just have to decide and act and shrug our shoulders if that decision turns out to be the wrong one. We acted for the best, based on the information we had at the time, and that’s all we can ask, really.

Mary

A Moodscope member