I have found myself recently thinking a lot about to an old film.
Not because it offers answers to the many questions that occupy my daily life our, nor because it contains any particular wisdom about policy, economics, technological change or reform. Rather, I have returned to it because it asks, quietly and persistently, a question which becomes more important as I age.
What remains?
The film is Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornatore’s beautiful meditation on memory, belonging and loss. Many of you will know it. It tells the story of Salvatore, a successful film director who learns that Alfredo, the elderly projectionist who had become his mentor and guide in childhood, has died. He returns to the Sicilian village he left decades earlier and finds himself immersed in memory. The film unfolds through recollection rather than chronology, through fragments of relationship, affection, regret and gratitude.
What makes the film so powerful and beautiful is that it understands something profoundly human. It knows that the events we imagine will define our lives are often not the things that endure. What remains are rarely the milestones we would place in a CV. The enduring realities are often found in the apparently ordinary moments that seemed insignificant at the time.
A conversation. A kindness. An encouragement. A presence.
Someone who believed in us before we believed in ourselves.
As I have reflected upon that film again, I have found myself thinking about social care.
At first glance, the connection might seem unlikely. Yet I increasingly wonder whether social care is one of the few places within our contemporary society that still pays sustained attention to what remains.
We inhabit a culture fascinated by the new. Political discourse is dominated by announcements, launches, reforms and innovations. Economies reward disruption. Technology markets promise the next breakthrough. Even our language often betrays an assumption that value lies primarily in novelty. Now don’t get me wrong progress matters as does innovation and there is no greater delight than discovery.
But there is a danger in allowing ourselves to become so preoccupied with what is emerging that we lose sight of what endures.
The work of social care invites a different perspective.
Every day across Scotland, care staff support people whose lives span decades of experience and memory. They care for individuals living with dementia, where fragments of the past often emerge with greater clarity than the events of yesterday. They support older citizens carrying stories shaped by war, migration, industrial change, community life and family histories stretching across generations. They accompany people through periods of illness, frailty, disability, transition and loss. In doing so, they become custodians of memory. That role is rarely acknowledged. Yet there is something profoundly significant about work which honours stories in a society that often rushes past them.
I have lost count of the number of times I have heard care staff speak about the importance of understanding the life that sits behind the individual. They know instinctively that no person can be reduced to a diagnosis, an assessment, a support plan or a collection of recorded information. Each individual arrives carrying a lifetime of memories, relationships, disappointments, joys, loves, achievements and losses.
The person requiring support today may once have taught generations of children. They may have worked on fishing boats in the north-east, cared for a family through difficult years, built homes, run businesses, written poetry, fallen in love, buried parents, celebrated grandchildren or travelled roads that none of us will ever fully know.
Social care understands that the story matters.
Indeed, some of the finest care I have ever witnessed begins with curiosity about a life rather than concern about a condition. What music did this person love? What made them laugh? Who did they miss? Where did they belong?
The older I become, the more convinced I am that these are among the most important questions we can ask of one another. Not because they help us understand the past, but because they reveal what remains.
For what remains of a life is rarely its accumulation.
It is its relationships. It is the love given and received. It is the friendships sustained. It is the communities that formed us. It is the acts of generosity extended to others when there was nothing tangible to gain in return.
This truth becomes clearer the more time we spend around ageing and care.
The novelist Marilynne Robinson once observed that human beings are not just living creatures but remembering creatures. We live through memory. We weave identity through recollection. We make sense of ourselves not only by where we are going but by where we have been. Remove memory entirely and something essential about personhood is diminished.
Perhaps that is why social care is of such importance.
It stands against the idea that value belongs only to the economically productive, the visibly successful or the technologically empowered. It insists that a life carries worth because it is a life. It reminds us that every individual remains a bearer of dignity, even when memory falters, physical strength weakens or independence diminishes.
There is a quiet counter-cultural wisdom in that stance.
For all our fascination with speed, social care teaches patience. For all our obsession with efficiency, social care teaches presence. For all our attention to what is coming next, social care teaches us to attend carefully to what is already here.
And perhaps that is why I keep returning to Cinema Paradiso.
The film is not nostalgic in any simplistic sense. It does not suggest that the past was perfect. Rather, it recognises that memory can illuminate what we most value. It helps us identify the people, places and relationships that shaped us. It reminds us that our humanity is formed through connection.
As Scotland continues to wrestle with questions about its future, as technology reshapes our institutions and as public services navigate immense challenge and opportunity, there may be value in occasionally pausing to ask not merely what comes next but what must endure.
What are the values that we are unwilling to surrender? What aspects of our common life deserve protection? What truths remain worth carrying forward into a rapidly changing future?
For me, the answers increasingly begin in the world of care. In kindness. In community. In memory. In belonging. In dignity.
And in the conviction that no human life should ever be regarded as expendable, forgotten or unseen.
The future will undoubtedly bring extraordinary change. New technologies will emerge. New social arrangements will evolve. New possibilities will be opened. Yet if those changes are to be worthy of celebration, they must strengthen rather than weaken the things that matter most.
Because when historians eventually look back upon our age, they may not remember every innovation, every political argument or every institutional reform.
But they will remember how we treated one another.
And that, perhaps, is what remains.
What Remains
Long after the announcements cease,
and the certainty of experts
is softened by time,
something else endures.
A hand resting upon another.
A story told for the hundredth time
and listened to as if it were the first.
A name remembered.
A promise kept.
A chair pulled closer
when loneliness enters a room.
Like old film reels turning
in a darkened cinema,
these moments flicker against the passing years.
Fragile.
Ordinary.
Almost invisible.
Yet they outlast so much that once appeared important.
For what remains of a life
is rarely what it possessed.
It is what it gave.
What remains of a community
is rarely what it built.
It is how it cared.
And what remains of us,
when titles are forgotten
and achievements fade,
is the shape of our love
in the lives of others.
Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash
On 14 September my book, The Human Future of Care: Artificial Intelligence, Human Rights and Dignity, is published. It explores artificial intelligence, human rights and the future of care, but beneath those themes lies a question that has accompanied me throughout its writing and which continues to grow in importance: in a time of relentless change, what are the things that remain, and how do we ensure they endure?
