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

I've spent a working life in business and finance, studied biology, history and philosophy, and served on the boards of a few charities I care about: The Royal Photographic Society, Liverpool College, The Open Eye Gallery, The Institute of Advanced Motorists.

Here I ask a question: how can we live well as we grow old? Ageing 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. Growing old seems to ask us to hold things more lightly, not more firmly. That way, it becomes easier to let go of things as we approach our final days.

Simone Weil wrote about a kind of love she called 'attention'. Iris Murdoch defined attention as "a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality." For Murdoch, attention is moral work: In choosing how to act, the moral work has already been primed through one’s perception of a situation.

Deep attention, then, is important to an approach for living the last phase. But the quality of listening and receiving that I’m alluding to depends on much groundwork, not least the ability to let go of one’s self-importance and pretences.