Facebook gave me a memory today. Four years ago, on the day before my 65th birthday, I recorded a short video from Bluebell Wood.
I had decided not to have a traditional birthday celebration. No balloons. No party. No big gathering. Instead, I was going to spend the day alone in the wood, in quiet reflection.
As a vision quest guide, ceremony has become an important part of how I thought about transitions. We often encouraged people to create their own rituals to mark change, to acknowledge an ending, or to step consciously into something new.
So that was what I intended to do for myself.
I remember saying that I wanted to step away from my normal environment and reflect on how far I had come over the previous five, ten and twenty years. I wanted to think about what had changed, what I had learned, and what might still be ahead.
I also remember saying that I certainly did not feel “over the hill.” Perhaps I had climbed one hill, I said, but there were more hills still to come.
Watching it again now, just before turning 69, I was struck by how much of that still feels true.
I was already choosing solitude over convention.
I was already recognising that a milestone birthday did not have to look celebratory from the outside in order to matter.
I was already learning that time alone was not something to be filled or avoided, but something I actively needed.
And I was already questioning the idea that getting older meant becoming smaller.
But four years is long enough for the meaning of some of those things to change.
At 65, there was a lot of energy in my language about what was still ahead. More hills. More opportunities. More experiences. I still believe in all of that.
But I think I am less interested now in the idea that later life has to be about constantly doing more.
There is a particular pressure around ageing that I have become increasingly wary of. We reject decline, quite rightly, but sometimes replace it with another demanding narrative: stay busy, stay adventurous, keep achieving, keep reinventing yourself, keep proving that you are still fully alive.
That can become another performance.
At 69, I am more interested in what fits. What matters. What feels like enough.
A great deal has changed since that 65th birthday.
My relationship with work has changed. My relationship with solitude has changed. My relationship with ambition has changed.
I still write. I still work. I still have ideas. I still get excited by new projects. But work no longer needs to occupy the centre of everything.
I spend far more time in nature. I spend more time alone. I write books, articles and long-form essays. I go to the cinema. I wander around places simply because I feel like it. I get on buses. I spend time at the wood. I notice wildlife. I think.
And increasingly, I allow myself to do things simply because they are right for the person I am now.
I am often asked whether I am retired. I never quite know what to do with the question.
I am not working in the way I once did. I no longer spend my days seeing clients. But “retired” does not really describe the life I am living either.
I think of myself as being in a different stage of life.
A stage with more freedom, more choice, and less need to organise myself around conventional expectations.
I am active, but I am also much more comfortable with simply being. That may be one of the biggest changes of all.
At 65, I was consciously creating space for reflection. At 69, I think I have created more of a life in which reflection has somewhere to live.
There is another reason the video affected me. Our past selves leave messages for us.
Sometimes through diaries. Sometimes through photographs. Sometimes through things we wrote. And sometimes through a slightly grainy Facebook video we had almost forgotten existed.
The woman in that video could not know what the next four years would bring.
She could not know which plans would continue, which would disappear, what would matter more, or what she would eventually stop needing.
But she was already moving towards something.
Towards more autonomy. Towards trusting herself. Towards understanding that solitude can be chosen rather than endured. Towards a life that feels less arranged around what is expected and more around what feels true.
I think that matters to me more now than the idea of “more hills to climb.”
There may still be more hills. I hope there are. But I no longer need every hill to be climbed.
Some can simply be looked at. Some can be walked around. Some can be left entirely alone.
Perhaps that is one of the quieter gifts of getting older. Not losing interest in life. Not withdrawing from it. But becoming more discerning about what deserves our energy.
The 65-year-old me was not wrong. She simply could not yet know what the next four years would teach her.
