58th birthday thoughts – birthdays always make you feel reflective don’t they? I always think that the time around New Year is a good point for reviewing life as a couple or family and the week around your birthday is a bit more personal, an opportunity to work out how things are going for you. I was 58 on Monday and a new decade is just starting to shimmer on a still faraway horizon. It feels a bit like that moment when you’re on a boat and you see the first impression of land in the distance. It isn’t time to disembark yet but you need to prepare yourself for arrival. And it’s easy, exciting even when you know where you’re going, when you’re on a journey that you’ve planned and your destination comes into view but life doesn’t run to the lines of a project. We live it forward, most often without a map.
Looking for a path
In an attempt to find some context, over the last few weeks I’ve found myself looking around at how other people are broaching the approach to 60 but I’ve realised that I don’t know many people who are there yet. Local friends who are a little bit older than me seem to have it all worked out, most of them have public sector or company pension plans and are on a clear path towards retiring soon with hazy days at the golf club and long cruises in mind. Friends further afield, especially those still in London who’ve often spent their lives working freelance are doing it differently with no plans to retire at all, they’re deeply engaged in all of the activity that surrounds them in their urban lives. So I thought about my mum at 58, she was just about to take an early retirement package from teaching and I remember she was so much looking forward to it. We’d just moved to a new house, I would soon be leaving for university and she was looking forward to gardening, she’d joined the Townswomen’s Guild, volunteered for Meals On Wheels and she and my dad had bought a caravan with their forthcoming freedom of the road in mind.
However hard I’ve looked, I haven’t been able to find an example of somebody leading a life in their late 50s/ early 60s that feels like a blueprint for me. Other than not having the pressure of generating an income each month (only those of you who work for yourselves will fully appreciate the burden of that)… plus the time and opportunity to take long trips of a lifetime… then there’s nothing about seriously slowing down that fully appeals to me yet. So I’ve been floundering in my birthday thinking – the harbour I’m sailing towards has felt shrouded in fog.
58th birthday thoughts – a conversation with my future self
But then I had an email from my friend Claudia who’d been reading my ‘Rewind to 1985’ post. I always look forward to seeing something from her in my Inbox because it’s so often like an old fashioned letter from a friend with a little update on life and an angle on something that will make me think. This time she mentioned that rather than looking retrospectively at advice she’d give to her younger self, she’s been looking ahead, trying to conjure herself at 80 and thinking about what words of wisdom she’d have for herself now. I loved that idea and went off feeling quite excited, it became the focus of my daily walks and the thought I was drawn to when I couldn’t sleep. I went over and over it in my head but I kept drawing a blank.
You see I instinctively approached it with the mile-stoning that I think most of our generation were brought up with. You know what I mean – establish your clear markers and plan the rest of your life around them. When I did it a lot back in my twenties and thirties it went something like:
Suddenly it occurred to me that this approach doesn’t work any more simply because there are no more milestones really… at least not many that are within my control. The biggest life events for me will focus around my boys and so my new milestones are simply a reflection of theirs.
It was a shock to realise that there’s no ‘thing’ left that I want for myself – I’m not aiming for a new house, a new car or a campervan or a canal boat, a cruise trip or a midlife promotion… there’s nothing like that to build a framework around. It struck me that my framework is already here – I have every ‘thing’ that I need (and I realise how fortunate I am in terms of achievement and also mindset to be able to say that).
Even with that patch of enlightenment I still couldn’t get the conversation with my 80 year-old self going though, it felt as if she was sitting on the harbour in a cafe in the mist and I just couldn’t reach her. So I decided to talk to Mal about my conundrum – he’s never surprised to hear that something weird’s going on in my head and he’s often good at helping me to unravel it. This time he suggested that it might help if I could see her, that if I could just picture myself sitting across a coffee table from her then the conversation might start to flow. He always tackles things visually and I didn’t think it would work for me but I spent a few evenings trying different apps to see if anything would give me a believable future version of myself… and finally I found her – here she is.
And yes it feels spooky to see that future me but at the same time she’s familiar because I can see traces of so many older women I’ve trusted in her face – my mum, my sister, my grandmother, my aunties. Slowly, with her right there in front of me the conversation has begun. It was light chitchat at first with her saying,
“aren’t you glad you focused on being fit and strong in your 50s? I’m not quite the bent old woman you feared I’d be.”
“and yes I have wrinkles but you can see they’re from a lifetime of laughter, if you keep on filling your mind with happy thoughts the outcome will be these happy looking lines. An older looking face is nothing to fear”
“and the haircut still works for you, it will always be your best investment.”
But then it moves on and she tells me,
“you got a lot of things right in your 50s with all of the foundation work you did – strength training… focusing on your relationship with Mal and the boys… looking at old friendships and cementing the important ones while letting others go, giving you space to cultivate new ones that share your interests now. Gradually adapting things you love doing such as dancing into a form that you could take through into the years to come by learning salsa. You did well to build your wardrobe with investment pieces that I still love but couldn’t afford to buy now. And working out how you want to travel while you still had a disposable income has saved me from wasting time and funds. I’m so glad you spent your 50s making the most of your youthfulness while you still had a good supply of energy – there’s plenty of time for gardening and watching Strictly Come Dancing in the years ahead – I’m so glad you didn’t waste the vibrant midlife years living an older woman’s life.”
It makes me feel glad – better about the choices I make that so often invoke criticism from people I know (and far more from those I don’t!). “That’s such a relief,” I tell her “but there must be things I’m doing wrong too. Tell me what needs to change.”
She smiles and says,
“I just wish you’d let yourself fully enjoy it all. You’ve reached a point in your life where you can stop feeling that every week is a new sand dune to climb. Your life has more solidity to it now thanks to all of the hard work you’ve put in over the years. I’m not saying that there won’t be any more slippages but you could fret so much less than you do – please appreciate that.
Stop driving yourself endlessly, especially with regard to work and the gym – there doesn’t always have to be a new goal, at some point you need to define a peak and be happy to maintain yourself there. And choose to embrace the fact that you live between two places. I know it often feels unsettling, as if you’re constantly packing and shuttling but it’s the right thing to be doing, especially for Mal’s mum. Instead of feeling torn just relax into it and enjoy the diversity of having two sides to your life. It’s time to take active pleasure in this stage of life that you’ve reached – whenever and wherever you find it.”
Working out how to get more out of the life you have
She’s given me a lot to ponder. I find stressing less about what might or might not happen a tricky mindset to achieve – when you work for yourself you live by the mantra ‘you can’t have freedom and security’ and so a low hum of worry is my permasetting. I don’t think I’ll ever have a day like my parents and siblings where they retired – i.e stopped doing paid work overnight. There will come a point where there’s less of a financial imperative but I’ll still want to work for a sense of purpose – and because it will be there as an option for making life more comfortable.
It’s a strange realisation though that the personal milestone stage is nearly over and so not driving myself as hard really is becoming an option. It takes me back to my Christmas post about actively choosing to be happy with what you have. When you read interviews with people who work with the dying they so often say that one of most regularly stated regrets is ‘not allowing myself to be happy.’ We hold ourselves back from simple contentment and don’t fully see the beauty that lies in our every day. So I’ve been thinking about her instruction to fully appreciate my life as it stands right now and working out how to develop a discipline of happiness? The thing is that I really don’t ever want to have the crushing end of life feeling of looking back and seeing that I could have been happier if I’d just appreciated what was in right front of me. Worrying less than I do will take time but seeing intrinsic ‘gladness’ is a good interim step.
Defining joys and pleasures
Back in December we chatted about working on savouring the small moments, the glimmers of joy that pop up in most days. I’ve got into a habit of that now, it’s become a reflex to pause every day and enjoy the simplicity of something like ducklings on the canal. Now I’ve decided to add another layer to that and it’s about identifying the pleasures. What’s the difference you ask. Well if joys are the things that put a spontaneous smile on your face, pleasures are the ones to be anticipated and lingered over. For some reason we often link the word ‘guilty’ to them – why do we do that? Why do we so often deny ourselves bliss? The great thing that I’m finding about pleasures is that you can build up a personal menu of them so that if you’re going through a bad time, you have something to turn to. Sometimes they have to be quite specific, you need to find the detail of the things you truly love – but they can be more meandering too. My growing list of pleasures includes:
I’m continuing to add to my pleasures every time I notice something that gives me that tingle of happiness from my scalp to my toes. The important thing once you’ve identified them though is not to overuse them or, like the magic in a fairy tale, they’ll lose their power.
So for my year of being 58 I’ll be dropping in for a coffee with future Nikki every so often to ask her how well she thinks I’m doing in terms of appreciating the life that I’ve built – she’s a good friend to have. And I’m going to suggest that you try this too – looking back at the way you’re living from your 80 year-old perspective is a really good way of identifying potential regrets and making sure you aren’t wasting your precious time on pointless things. So if you’d like to be able to see yourself at 80 to make it all feel more real, the best app I found was called FaceApp, nothing else that I tried was as good. It ages you for free and you can use it for things like trying on glasses and sunglasses as well as different hair colours and hairstyles too. Listen to what your future self has to say to you – and start working on your own menu of pleasures too.
Don’t let midlife spill away
The thing about midlife is that we’re at the point where we still have vivacity and, for the first time in years, we have more time and opportunity to let it shine through. It’s a time for being the person we’ve always known we are inside but often we’ve been too weighed down with life to let her live fully. Don’t worry about what other people will think – yes your partner/children/friends might joke about you suddenly having a midlife crisis but let them, they’ll get used to it – and soon you’ll find they’re quietly telling you that they admire your new chutzpah. So let’s all stop holding ourselves back, let’s take pleasure where we find it, squeezing everything we can from this part of our lives. Joy and pleasure and fun don’t just come along and tap us on the shoulder, we have to seek them out. It’s worth doing though because none of us want to reach our 80s and look back with a sense of disappointment that we allowed the potential of this time to simply slip through our fingers. This was me fully embracing my 58th birthday this week, determined to shine in the face of time’s winged chariot.
So there you go, a project for a bank holiday weekend. Maybe we should have a gallery on Midlifechic showcasing what vibrant older women we’re going to be because we’ve lived our lives to the full – all the way through. I look forward to hearing your ‘lifelong’ thoughts in the comments – see you next Friday.
Disclosure: ’58th birthday thoughts – a conversation with my future self’ is not a sponsored post
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