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Good morning. Yesterday the Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, celebrated his 70th birthday. The official portrait showed him smiling surrounded by three generations of his family. The Prince is quoted as saying that his birthday had brought him to the alarming realisation that he had reached a Biblical threshold, He was referring to the 90th Psalm: ‘The days of our age are threescore years and ten’. I have a friend, a priest, who is now in his late 70s and says that every time he has a painful twinge he imagines God reminding him, ‘I meant it when I said three score years and ten’. Of course more and more of us are living well into our seventies and beyond. We’ll have a past, a long one. Among our varied life experiences we will have the satisfactions of survival and achievement, most of us will have formed our own families, we’ll know where we stand politically and what we believe really matters. In other words we’ll know pretty well who we are. And we’ll also know quite a few people who have already died, some of them younger than we are. Many will carry what Prince Charles described as ‘the scars’ of life. Things we wish we hadn’t done but can’t now do much about. Sorrows and bereavements that have become part of our character. We might start to think about what our life’s goals really mean. And this is when we begin to climb what the New York writer David Brooks describes as ‘the second mountain’. If our earlier life, he says, was about battling to build ourselves up this is often where we begin to battle against ourselves, or at least against our egos; that drive to compete and fulfil our personal wants. The ego has its uses of course but in the later decades of life it can get in the way; it needs to be deflated. Or perhaps another way of putting it is that it needs to be given. This is the time of harvest, of generativity, of pouring forth all that we are and have been without calculating what’s in it for us. According to David Brooks nobody climbs the second mountain without a struggle. Self-pity, bitterness, trying to hold on to power which is no longer ours. It is likely that the perils of the last decades of life will be as trying as any we shall encounter, because time is running out, and we can fritter time if we panic. The alternative is to relax our grip on getting our way. The world is bigger for not being dominated by our needs. Instead we can find contentment in being part of the longing, the spoken or unspoken prayer of all humanity. The ninetieth psalm contains words which apply perhaps especially to the over 70s: ‘So teach us to number our days: that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom’.