On turning fifty

Do you accept the linear bell curve of old age? I don't.

I turn 50 today. It feels like 30, but better. More landed. Less buzzy.

I feel this milestone lends me a certain licence to write about aging.

Some frame 50 as having passed a half-way peak. They position it somewhere on the decline down the other side. But that only sticks if you envisage existence as a linear bell curve. I don’t.

I feel, as with so much today, my age (my life) is a multi-layered, meaning-entangled clump of my own making.

Here are some broad thoughts on age (and life), followed by some more intimate ones toward the bottom….

😌 Henry Miller, upon turning 80, wrote a limited edition essay called On Turning 80. I like his pitch, particularly the particularities (which I bold):

If at eighty…you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you… if you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.

I think the above is what we all seek from our lives from about the age of 35. But we only start to live out these simple joys around the 50-mark, as we get firmer with casting out the irrelevancies of our “productive lives” - the friterrings, as Henry David Thoreau termed them¹.

This image was taken by Cindy Kavanagh as part of her ModernMuse project, 50 women at 50. I’m wearing a men’s Bonds singlet + skirt by my mate Heidi at The Art Club

At 50, I think, we understand life goes nowhere. And settle into this truth. We forgive and forget because it’s the least resistant path and makes most sense as we free ourselves of the exhausting distractions of our youth, such as our pride and righteousness. Falling in love again and again, and being inspired by nature - these are things we have to actively choose. This is where aging gets artful. This is where we can jump off the linear bell curve and we can direct the trajectory and shape of things.

😌 Simone de Beauvoir, whose birthday is one day after mine, wrote in her book Old Age (the French title is much nicer: La Vieillesse), that we can’t be great at aging, we can’t fix it or do it better than others. “It is a fact - something to be met on its own terms.”

Image: The Paris Review

De Beauvoir isn’t arguing that we must work furiously on acceptance. And neither am I. The terms of old are not that it’s a dire inevitability that we have to give into. No, they are more specific. They invite a thriving.

De Beauvoir writes that we resist old age more than death because old age, not death, is what contrasts with life. “Old age is life’s parody,” she writes. These are the terms.

“There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work…”

I’d phrase it differently, I think the terms of old age are that there is an opportunity to really step into meaning-making, to radically be the person we’ve been “saving for later”, to use all our earned smarts to cast aside the distractions and get “game on” with our dharma. We can rise to the terms or not. We can thrive… or accept diminishment.

Me, I like the brutality of these terms. I respond well to the imperative to ensure my life is not an absurd parody, and to the urgency. I quite love the time-boundedness of things. It reminds me of a passage from This One Wild and Precious Life:

It’s in our nature to attend to morals and meaning because we are the only animal that is conscious that our time here is finite. The prince of Troy Tithonus lived a life where nothing he did mattered. I mean, if you’re not going to die from your choices, you can do whatever you want. Carte blanche. Eventually he became so miserable from this infinite meaninglessness that he petitioned the other gods to make him human so his choices – his life – could matter and be of value. Being human is to do things that matter.

I find myself saying, so very often, “Sarah, this ain’t no dress rehearsal any longer…it’s the real thing.” I think many of us (fairly and appropriately) live the first part of our lives heavily caveated with this notion that our mistakes are “practice for the real thing”, that our hard work is about setting us up so that we can reap the rewards when we…are living the real thing.

At 50, I must now treat my life as the real thing.

That said, at 50, I feel I am indeed living the real thing. For me, shit just got real on its own. I didn’t have to force it. Here I am, fully rehearsed. Sufficiently warmed up. And I’m on.

😌 I think this transition possibly happens more readily for women than it does for men, for a few reasons, some of which have to do with hormones. I’ve written about this before:

So this is a wonderful thing that Jane Fonda flagged a year or two ago. I heard her talking about it on a podcast. As a woman gets older and her estrogen levels decrease, she finds that she has less f*cks to give about dumb stuff and more f*cks to give about good stuff…like fighting climate change. We don’t suddenly stop caring as we get older, of course. No, the caring muscle is still firing from decades of estrogen coursing through us. But we can now put this musculature to more artful use.

Similarly, Germain Greer (or was it Helen Garner?) once said about turning 50 that she was finally at an age where she was excused from laughing at men’s unfunny jokes. We don’t care about impressing men in this way any longer (and don’t need to do it to feel safe, either).

Women have also spent several decades fostering great friendships and networks and have refined the art of good conversation and deep consideration, which puts us in great stead for getting super real. Tragically, the bulk of men have not. Men also tend to become more closed post-50, switching readily to conservative, conspiracy politics. It’s a shame.

Another ModernMuse image by Cindy Kavanagh

I have a few other nitty-grittier thoughts, too

• I feel slightly resentful of the youthful imperative that accompanies being 50 today. ALL THOSE BLOODY CONTOURING MAKEUP VIDEOS. I feel that the pressure to look younger than I am gets in the way of the radical stuff I want to do. Attending to grey hair and worrying about our resting bitch faces takes up too much time. I thought I’d be free of all this shit by 50. I manage to sidestep a fair whack of this horribleness living in Paris. During Covid lockdowns growing out grey hair became quite normalised. I have a fancy (Australian) hairdresser in Paris and the team are BIG on encouraging grey hair. I’m summoning courage…

• I acknowledge that the deep “meeting life on its terms” process I’m going through comes as we go through an existential reckoning as a species. I think each is assisting the other. This makes me feel a deep dread and guilt for young people, and inspires a dialled up responsibility to be a leader, to be of radical service.

• I’ve noticed I tend to only get pissed off once now. When I was younger, like many women, I would get pissed off (internally), then feel bad about feeling this way, then get pissed off for feeling bad…and so on. Such that the external result was a hot, entangled explosion. Now, I simply get pissed off. Once. Because I finally feel I am “allowed to” (per having the right kind of fucks to give and not feeling the same fear of male reprisal, as above). This is similar to my “just do anxiety once” thesis.

• I have really enjoyed Isabel Allende and Jane Fonda’s words on getting old on Julia Louis Dreyfus's podcast. I listened to both earlier in the year and found myself looking forward to being in my seventies.

• I love my 50-year old energy. It’s solid. And it’s well-earned. It comes from finding a very particular even strength that you can only master from being in the trenches of hardship at lest 34498 times.

• I love that today’s 20 and early 30-something men dig older women. I love their reasons for it. And I love spending time with this cohort of humans.

• I love that the will-I-or-won’t-I-have-kids-one-day wrestle with myself has stopped.

• My eyesight struggles. But I see things far clearer.

Here’s to more years, more life!

Sarah xx

PS It’s great to be back!

1. The actual quote: “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”