Diving for bricks, the water resisting, the sting of chlorine in your nose

Today I am mostly preoccupied with wondering what the really good things to be are, the really fine and important qualities a person can have and that one might aspire to. And the relationship between what a person is like and how they are - whether you can come up with a set of adjectives that is anything more than more or less arbitrary and/or generic.

What are the things that really express a person’s essence, and how do you know, and what really matters in a person?

Just an easy question to be getting on with. Answers on the back of a postcard please...

Sometimes I think that bit of my brain that people have that enables them to understand about other people having minds and emotions is one of the Slow Swimmers, still needing armbands – and a float too*. Because when I really think about other people really having selves (or even myself, I suppose) it seems so incredibly ineffable and incomprehensible…

*And what a lot of memories that thought dredges up – the smell of chlorine, humid air, the tiny swimming pool at my primary school, a boy who was a slow swimmer, a girl too, the changing sheds, talcum powder and the inevitable veruca sock that someone always had, summer days, the field, the quick space of bright light and air between the dimness of the pool at the dimness of the changing room, blue check summer dress against damp skin… Astonishing. Perhaps people are like trees, growing a new layer, a new skin, every year, but all the old layers are still there, in the heartwood.