Approaching mid-70s, I’m a carer, father, gardener, photographer, walker, bread-baker, contemplater, mountain runner and yoga follower. I’m Tony Cearns.

I've spent a working life in business and finance, studied biology, history and philosophy (still do), and served on the boards of a few education and arts charities that I care about.

Here I ask a question: how can we live well as we grow old when the ageing process itself can seem to put up so many barriers.

My answers are oblique; not because I try to be evasive, but because ready-made responses suggest a certainty that ill-suits the nature of the question.

Let me briefly expand on why I hold this view.

The anthropologist Tim Ingold drew a distinction between navigation and wayfaring. Navigation suggests a planned destination and an optimal route. Wayfaring involves making it up as you go along, and being attentive and responsive to change.

The philosopher Isabelle Stengers advises us to resist the urge to settle on fixed answers, thereby allowing room for continuing inquiry.

And Simone Weil wrote about a kind of love she called 'attention', which Iris Murdoch defined as ‘a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.’

There is a sort of wisdom expressed through these principles which I try to convey through my articles and photographs. Hence the title of the site: ‘without force or haste’. Posts are of a wayfaring kind, not rushing towards certainty and based (hopefully) on a close attention to things.

A few words about my use of AI.

I do not use AI to write or edit articles or produce images. I believe that the struggle of writing first hand helps us be attentive to our thoughts. Writing with the aid of AI can only be at best second-hand. In the same vein, I believe that producing photographs using film cameras and darkroom printing enables us to be in closer touch to our thoughts and feelings. I do use AI to research topics, create reading lists, find quotes and so on. It would be very difficult to avoid the use of AI in this way, so embedded has it become in search facilities through web browsers.