Swimming for life and health Then I stopped to catch my breath, and he did too, so I got a good look at him. He was 80 years old, if he was a day, and he had the grace to smile at me. And I thought: shut up with your judgments about other swimmers, Archer. You don't know what it takes this man to get out of bed in the morning, let alone to force structure on his day - a day that might otherwise be spent indoors - with a morning swim. You should be celebrating him, praying that one day you emulate him, not damning him. I left the pool and moved to Caffè Nero, to meet both my old friend and a work colleague, who was coming to the meeting too. We talked about statistics, our "passion," and went on to the meeting, where we held forth about something obscure. As though it mattered. At the end of the conference, my work colleague and I returned to the coffee shop; I expected a dissection on the day's proceedings. Instead, he told me he'd probably be absent from work for a while, since a close relative had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness. He wanted to spend as much of the summer with his loved one as possible. I offered the best condolences I could muster, aware of their horrible, anticipatory status. How do you offer pre-condolences? How do you separate real compassion from your own shiver of memento mori? I caught the Tube home. When the train surfaced from the tunnel at Finchley, an email from my old friend, the conference organiser, made the iPhone vibrate. He had sent me a note to explain why we'd not seen so much of each other these past few years. His wife, the beautiful woman I'd last met at their wedding, had been diagnosed with cancer soon after they married, and while her prognosis was good, they had spent all their time fighting it. I had thoughtlessly assumed that they had been too happy, alone with one other's company - common enough for newly-weds - to seek out old university acquaintances. And I hadn't bothered to keep in touch. Both these friends did me an honour, by opening windows into battles for life and health that are no less shocking for being random, almost quotidian. More and more I sense that almost nothing matters, other than spending as much time as possible with our loved ones. Because our span is so finite, and short, and subject - as a statistician might say - to a random stopping rule. Neither of my friends gives in to despair. Like the old guy in the pool, it's not the state of their stroke that matters. It's the fact that they keep on swimming at all that is amazing. Love and human beings: if we didn't know they existed, we wouldn't believe in their possibility.