Learning lines.
What scares you about getting older?
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
What most recently made you cry?
Identity & self
Question
What would you like to leave your children?
Death & what remains
Question
Which book are you ashamed not to have read?
Taste & recommendation
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Failure & regret
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A newer fixed question in The Guardian's rotating Q&A pool.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Losing the people that I love.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 April 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 61 →Nothing. I love getting old – I love the freedom it allows you.
Winston Churchill
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1940–1945 and 1951–1955; Member of Parliament 1900–1964
One by one the more vigorous sports and exacting games fall away. Exceptional exertions are purchased only by a more pronounced and more prolonged fatigue. Muscles may relax, and feet and hands slow down; the nerve of youth and manhood may become less trusty. But painting is a friend who makes no undue demands, excites to no exhausting pursuits, keeps faithful pace even with feeble steps, and holds her canvas as a screen between us and the envious eyes of Time or the surly advance of Decrepitude. Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely.
Recorded
Essay first published in the Strand Magazine in 1921–22 and collected in Amid These Storms, 1932, Winston S. Churchill, Painting as a Pastime, Project Gutenberg Canada, 1932
source ↗
I don’t want to get into an early death spiral, when you’re scaling down your life unnecessarily because you’ve already been there or done that. I never want to stop adventuring.
More from Gregory Porter
View profile →Barack Obama, for his humility and grace in the face of enormous difficulty.
Telling a story to my son about my brother.
A bushel of self-confidence.
Because it’s in one of my songs, War and Peace.
“You’re selfish.” It was a friend.
Dancing on stage with an open fly.
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