Eva Bradley: What will you think when you're 80?

Eva Bradley.

There's a certain glamour and prestige to photographing weddings. They are beautiful, big-budget and brimful of the hope and optimism embodied in a celebration focused on the start of a new life with new love.

For all of those reasons and more, wedding photography is mostly what I do.
But now and again and in the less romantic months of winter I mix it up with whatever else passes in front of my lens, and last weekend that was an 80th.

In many ways an event like this could be considered the antithesis of a wedding; looking back instead of forward, reflecting on what was instead of what might be. The guest list has been ravaged by the cruel and relentless march of time, there is less hair and certainly less need for the hero shots on a hillside at sunset.

And yet, as last weekend proved to me, a celebration towards life's end can in many ways knock a wedding out of the park.

It all depends, of course, on how you lived those 80 years.

For quite a long time now, the 'What will you think when you're 80?' question has been my litmus test for all of life's big decisions.

In the cut-and-thrust of real life in your 30s, it is sometimes easy to lose perspective and make decisions for the wrong reasons.

Usually (for me, anyway), they are financially motivated decisions and ones that revolve around questions like: "Should I accept that job to photograph the 80th on one of my rare weekends off, or spend it with my family?"

Often I pause long enough to ask myself the secondary, clincher question: "When I'm 80 what will I look back on and wish I'd had more of - time with people I loved, or money?"

It's a no-brainer that most of us will reach old age wishing only that we'd made more time for the things that really mattered ... the things that are the most valuable but have no price tag, that are free to those willing to make the investment of time.

Surrounded by a large and clearly adoring family, it was clear to me that the subject of my assignment last week had clearly made the right decisions, and was now cashing in on the rich rewards of a lifetime investment in his children and still-beautiful wife.

If he had regrets (and maybe he did), I doubt very much that they centred around missed opportunities to have worked harder and earned more. When you wash up at life's end, those things just don't matter.

And yet despite knowing the truth of that intellectually, I still confound myself constantly by being unable to make the practical decisions in the here-and-now to avoid the if-onlys sure to set in much later in life.

My pursuit of success in the two juxtaposed worlds of business and parenting leads to inevitable compromises on both fronts and a total lack of time to enjoy the fruits of the hard-won labours of either role anyway.

In short, I am the poster child for the First World, girls-can-do-anything, 21st century woman: busy acquiring success in the present while amassing guaranteed regrets for my old age.

It's a given that all of us would wish passionately at the close of day to look back on life and say 'no regrets'. But to do that, or even come close, what are you going to change or give up right now to collect the dividend in years or decades to come?