Welcome to Age with Attitude, where I explore one question:

What sustains a life as we age?

Subscribe now

I find village conversation comforting for about ten minutes.

I enjoy walking through the village, buying bread, knowing the baker. I like the weather exchanged as a greeting, the news of who has moved into which house, the small observations that hold ordinary life together.

And then I want to go home and wrestle with a difficult book.

Perhaps this comes from a childhood spent in rural Australia, followed by an adulthood spent trying to catch up with what was happening in the wider world.

For years, I did that through how-to books and courses on almost everything. I was a prolific reader and researcher. There was always something more to understand, another skill to acquire, another system that promised to help me do life better.

Somewhere beneath all that learning was a longing for city life, especially in Europe. I imagined these cities as places where people gathered around large tables and discussed important ideas. Big thinkers were somewhere out there, engaged in conversations I could not quite access.

I found Substack five years ago and began writing because I had been told to start somewhere and pull the string.

For a while, Substack seemed to offer the intellectual world I had been seeking. But recently, after removing social media apps from my phone, I began to see Substack Notes taking over my attention as another version of the same distraction. A constant stream of brief observations, advice and opinions asking for my attention.

Even many of the essays began to feel bland.

They were not necessarily poor essays. I could see that their readers valued them. But I had begun to want something more. My time felt too valuable to spend reading words that left me exactly where they found me.

I started to notice a difference between kinds of writing. There were information essays that told me something. There were how-to essays that explained what I should do. There were opinion pieces that invited agreement or disagreement.

And then, occasionally, there were essays that sparked me.

They did not simply give me information. They altered the quality of my attention. They made me look again at something I thought I already understood.

I found

Karlsson lives with his wife and daughters on a small, pine-covered island in the Baltic Sea. His life appears to be intensely local, yet his writing places him in conversation with thinkers and readers around the world.

Here was someone enjoying small-scale living without surrendering the larger intellectual world.

His writing seemed to begin with attention: to his children, his marriage, his reading, his work and the texture of an ordinary day. He once wrote that ten thousand hours of conversation with his wife had changed him and brought him into deeper contact with himself and reality.

That sentence stopped me.

Ten thousand hours of conversation.

Not a course completed. Not a qualification earned. Not a productivity system mastered. Attention sustained over years until it changed the person paying it.

Karlsson showed me that a serious intellectual life did not require living in a city or gaining entry to some distant circle of thinkers. It could begin with close attention to the life directly in front of you.

Then I found

Where Karlsson drew me deeper into attention, Rao expanded the frame.

His essay ‘Touching Time’ began with a man lying on a lawn and expanded outward towards spaceship Earth. I loved the way his mind moved from an ordinary moment into a much larger frame.

Some of his essays in Protocolized were harder for me to grasp. But instead of turning me away, that difficulty intrigued me. I had found ideas large enough to want to wrestle with. I loved them.

I realised I did not need to master every argument. I could allow myself to wrestle with an idea without requiring immediate clarity. Confusion did not mean I had failed as a reader. Sometimes it meant I had reached the edge of what I already knew.

Rao also runs a book club. His 2026 reading list, The Divergence Machine, explores the emergence of modern civilisation through books I would probably never have encountered on my own.

I began with the April selection, Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature, about Alexander von Humboldt.

Humboldt—who, I wondered, and how did I not know him?

His expeditions read at times like an Indiana Jones adventure. But what enthralled me most was the decades of attention he paid to the natural world. Where much of science had divided nature into separate specimens and categories, Humboldt began to see relationships. Climate, geography, plants, animals and human activity formed one living whole.

He started with details and observations, then spun outward towards the greater context.

Humboldt’s curiosity made my own scattered interests feel less scattered. Perhaps connections are not always visible at the beginning. Perhaps they emerge from a body of attention accumulated over time.

The next book I picked up was Robert Darnton’s The Business of Enlightenment, a detailed history of the Encyclopédie's publishing.

I was fascinated that anyone had thought to write such a book, let alone that I would find myself absorbed by the commercial, political and practical work involved in moving knowledge through eighteenth-century Europe.

How were books printed, financed and transported? How did dangerous ideas evade the authority of the Church and state? How did booksellers, smugglers, printers and readers participate in changing what could be known?

I could feel the background of history filling in behind ideas I had previously encountered only in their finished form.

I had found my world.

Or perhaps I had finally learned how to enter it.

I am learning to stop and engage with an author rather than merely moving through the pages. I notice what unsettles me, what delights me and what continues to follow me after the book is closed.

I no longer feel obliged to absorb the whole argument. Sometimes one sentence is enough. Sometimes a single idea comes home with me and begins connecting itself to things I have noticed elsewhere.

I could not have understood this way of reading when my life was organised around achievement. Then, reading meant acquiring useful knowledge. A book was something to complete, understand and perhaps apply. I wanted to know what the author wanted me to know.

At seventy, I read differently.

I am more interested in what happens between the author’s ideas and my own lived experience. I stop more often. I make connections. I argue. I wander away. I return days later because something has continued working beneath the surface.

What does it feel like to discover that the intellectual world is so much larger than the one you were given? For those who have read this way all their lives, it may be difficult to imagine the joy of discovering it now.

It feels expansive rather than belated.

There is so much I do not know. Once, that might have made me anxious. Now it makes the future feel larger.

Serious reading in later life is often presented as a way to remain cognitively sharp. That matters, but it seems an impoverished description of what reading can make possible.

Reading can continue to enlarge my world.

It can give me language for experiences I have felt but could not name.

It allows me to test ideas against reality, revise what I believe and reconsider who I think I am.

It resists the narrowing of attention that can come not simply with aging, but with familiarity—with believing we already know what the world contains.

Most of all, it keeps me in active conversation with life.

Perhaps village life and serious reading are not competing worlds after all.

One keeps me close to ordinary human life. The other stretches the quality of attention I bring back to it.

I can walk through the village, buy bread, ask after someone’s garden and listen to the latest local news.

And then I want to go home and lose myself in a book that makes me think.

This, too, is what sustains me.

I’d love to hear how this lands for you.

Hit the Like button below, or let’s continue the conversation in the Comments.

Leave a comment

Welcome to Age with Attitude, where I explore one question:

What sustains a life as we age?

Subscribe now

I had almost given up on the word influence.

It had become too entangled with Instagram, personal brands, followers, algorithms and people pointing at captions on a screen.

Then I began noticing other forms of influence.

Some older people influence us through the ideas and experience they continue to contribute.

Others influence us by making becoming visible—and possible.

Recently, I watched a story on Landline about Terry McCosker, a maverick agronomist who has spent four decades changing the way farmers think about grazing, soil and land.

As a young agronomist, McCosker began investigating a radical grazing system designed to restore dying perennial grasses. In the 1990s, its principles challenged conventional farming so directly that government agriculture departments tried to run him out of town.

But farmers who adopted the system saw results. Ideas once dismissed as fringe—biodiversity, soil carbon and sustainable grazing—gradually became mainstream. McCosker’s work has since influenced farming practices across tens of millions of hectares and several generations of farmers.

What struck me was not only the scale of that influence.

It was that, at 82, he is still travelling, consulting and speaking about how healthier soil can help farmers manage an increasingly variable climate.

Last week, after the loss of our beehive, I wrote about what happens when the failure of a larger ecological system enters our personal world.

McCosker’s influence moves in the other direction. One person’s sustained commitment has travelled outward, helping to repair a much larger living system.

What sustains someone through those decades of opposition and uncertainty? McCosker cites self-belief, persistence and principles that do not age.

This is influence through continued expression:

I still have something to give.

Joan MacDonald influences in a different way.

At 70, struggling with poor health and increasing reliance on medication, she chose to change direction. She learned to lift weights, changed the way she ate and mastered the technology needed to track her progress.

She now has millions of followers on Instagram, but the platform is not the source of her influence.

Her authority comes from lived experience.

She began late and allowed people to witness the difficult, unglamorous process of change.

She did not become influential because she built an audience.

She built an audience because the honesty of her life became influential.

What she offers is not a formula to copy. It is evidence that we may still have something left to become.

This is influence through embodied possibility:

You may still have something to become.

My own influence story is only beginning.

Age with Attitude started as a place for me to examine how I want to live as I age: how to remain capable, curious, engaged and open to becoming.

I am not writing from the far side of mastery.

I am living my questions in public.

I am not denying decline. I am refusing to let decline become the whole story.

The work is first for me. Writing helps me notice, test and understand ideas and practices that might sustain a life.

I promised myself 100 essays, not because I know they will gain traction, but because I want to give the ideas enough time to deepen into a body of work.

Most writing about aging seems to begin with decline or offer another list of ten things we should do about it.

That is not what I want to add to the world.

I want to show honestly what it looks like to keep examining a life at 70; to build capability, change direction, remain attentive and ask what might still be possible.

This is the aging-with-attitude journey I am undertaking for my current self, my 80-year-old self or even my 90-year-old self. Anyone who finds value in travelling alongside me is welcome to come.

Terry McCosker could not have known how far his once-radical principles would travel.

Joan MacDonald could not have known that beginning again at 70 would enlarge the possibilities imagined by millions of other people.

Perhaps that is how genuine influence begins.

Not with a plan to become influential, but with an honest commitment to something that matters—and the willingness to keep going before anyone else can see where it might lead.

Terry McCosker says:

I still have something to give.

Joan McDonald says:

You may still have something to become.

And I say:

Begin where you are. Do what you can. Keep going.

I’d love to hear how this lands for you.

Hit the Like button below, or let’s continue the conversation in the Comments.

Leave a comment

Welcome to Age with Attitude, where I explore one question:

What sustains a life as we age?

Subscribe now

Our beehive died this week.

In the scheme of world suffering, it is a small event. People lose partners, parents, pets, and homes. A backyard beehive should not feel like a catastrophe.

But grief does not always follow the hierarchy of importance. Sometimes it attaches itself to the place where a much larger story enters a personal one.

This was not only the loss of a hive. It was the arrival of scale. Existential anxiety often arrives dressed as something ordinary. Today, it arrived as an empty beehive.

The hive was a COVID project.

We needed to refocus our energy away from that unfolding global catastrophe.

We needed to feel like we still had some agency.

We needed to care.

I bought Frank a beekeeping course for his birthday in March 2021. He is a natural animal carer and was a bit lost when we left our tiny farm for a beach house.

He bought a Top Bar hive flatpack and set about building it. As well as being more natural than the standard hive, I preferred its look as garden furniture.

Even before we received our bees, we joined the local beekeeping club. Frank set about watching hours of YouTube videos to learn everything he could.

It was an exciting day when the workshop leader arrived with a nuc hive (a nucleus colony), a miniature, fully functioning beehive, consisting of 3 to 5 frames holding a laying queen, worker bees, brood, and food stores and helped Frank set it up.

He was so calm around the bees. I was in awe of the way he let them fly around his uncovered face as they got to know him.

We loved to sit on our deck to watch these incredible creatures go about their ancient work. They soon found their new flight path and danced for each other to show where the best nectar was.

A couple of months later, it was time to collect honey. Frank suited up. Too hot for the full suit here, so he had donned the top half but taped his shorts to his thighs. Ten to twelve kilograms of luscious honey from our one backyard hive per year. Plenty to gift to friends and family.

Then our first swarm happened. A queen exits the hive with half the hive, up into a tree, before setting out to find a new place to live. (a normal hive reproduction process) Frank pulled out his spare nuc box and, with bare hands, coaxed them gently into it from the tree. Now there was a nuc for someone else wanting to start or expand their hives. Our hive set about re-queening.

Frank would put a beach umbrella over them when it was too hot and cover the hive in the pouring rain. He would answer my or anyone else’s endless questions.

He loved getting young family members up close and personal with bees. A window at the back of the hive allowed a view of the inner workings of the hive. My great-nephew was obsessed. He would save his money to buy honeycomb from Frank on his visits.

How could such tiny creatures provide so much joy?

Then, last week, as we sat on the deck with our usual morning coffee, I noticed bees on the ground.

Not one or two.

Many.

They were struggling to fly. Some crawled. Some turned in circles. Something was wrong. At first, we hoped it was the cold snap. Frank put insulation into the hive.

We watched. We waited.

But I think we both knew.

It was painful to watch. The depth of the sadness took us by surprise.

You know that feeling when you lose a pet. The ache is intimate and specific. These were not pets in the usual sense, but they were ours in the way a living thing becomes yours when you have cared for it.

We were not owners so much as stewards.

And perhaps that is why the grief felt different. It was not only affection. It was responsibility. It was helplessness. It was the knowledge that this tiny collapse belonged to something much larger.

The biosecurity breach.

Varroa destructor (varroa mite) was first detected in Australia in June 2022, in sentinel hives at the Port of Newcastle in New South Wales.

For more than a year, the biosecurity response was intense. Hive movements were restricted. Infected and exposed hives were euthanised. Beekeepers tested, reported, waited, watched maps, and hoped the line would hold.

We did everything asked of us.

We’d already registered our hive. We tested regularly. We watched the affected-area map slowly spread towards us in pink.

In September 2023, eradication was declared no longer feasible. Australia moved from trying to keep Varroa out to learning how to live with it.

That sentence sounds administrative.

It is not.

It means the burden shifted to every beekeeper, commercial and backyard. It means treatments, testing, timing, cost, loss, and constant vigilance. It means feral honey bee colonies—the swarms that once escaped into trees and hollows and kept pollinating without anyone managing them—are likely to collapse in vast numbers.

It means pollination becomes less invisible.

Honey may become more expensive. Pollination services may become more difficult. Crops that depend on managed honey bees may become more vulnerable. The quiet architecture behind ordinary food begins to show itself.

This is not only our hive.

This is Australia.

This is pollination.

This is the fragile architecture behind our food.

I usually write about what sustains a life as we age.

But this week, standing beside an emptying hive, the question widened to:

What sustains life?

Not in the abstract. Not as a slogan. But here, in our garden, in the hum we took for granted, in the pollination we barely noticed, in the systems that kept working quietly until they didn’t.

We cannot hold the whole system steady.

But we can notice what is being lost.

We can care for our small corner.

We can refuse to look away.

Sources consulted:

Australian Government Varroa mite outbreak updates;

NSW Department of Primary Industries Varroa mite information;

Australian Department of Agriculture pest profile;

ABC News reporting on Varroa in Queensland.

I’d love to hear how this lands for you.

Hit the Like button below, or let’s continue the conversation in the Comments.

Leave a comment

My Favorite Reads this week:

On Walden Pond, with Wi-Fi by

Yes, I am in my 80s, but I’m Still Making New Friends by

Spending in Retirement: From Accumulating to Allowing by

Welcome to Age with Attitude, where I explore one question:

What sustains a life as we age?

Subscribe now

Last week, I wrote about the uncomfortable realisation that one fitness system was no longer enough. For years, Peloton gave me almost everything I needed from exercise: structure, music, metrics, challenge, community, consistency, and joy.

Then osteoporosis entered the room and changed the landscape.

Suddenly, the system I loved was no longer the whole answer. I needed heavier loading. I needed evidence-informed, bone-specific strength work. I needed something targeted enough to make me feel I was not simply hoping for the best.

The tension was real.

I did not want to give up the movement that made me happy. But I also could not ignore what my body now required. I’d been torn between systems. Peloton, Onero, Mobility. It had begun to feel like too many voices in the room.

Then, after writing that essay, something resolved.

The tension collapsed.

Not because I found one perfect answer.

Because I put one of them into a neat container.

I decided to start the Onero (LIFTMOR) program with a Physiotherapist rather than going it alone. Two sessions a week. Bone-specific strength. Supervised progression. Evidence-informed loading. Tick it off. Onero may not give me the same joy, but it gives me reassurance, direction, and evidence that I am doing serious work.

Osteoporosis had spoken. Onero now had a clear job and a contained system.

Almost immediately, I felt calm.

The adult me had done the right thing.

And the kid in me now revelled in the freedom outside that space.

Peloton could now return to being what it has always been for me: joy, challenge, music, momentum, and play.

That is when I saw the bigger pattern.

Some people think structure limits freedom.

For me, structure creates it.

Structure is how I stop wondering and start doing.

It is how I channel energy.

It is how I create more with less.

It is how I turn intention into action, action into capability, and capability into self-respect.

I show up. I chose a ride. I meet a challenge. I earn points.

The ride feels good in the body, but the system lets me feel good about myself.

Then yesterday, in my Peloton Over 60s Facebook group, someone posted that he had ridden 940.4 miles in May.

Holy moly! I asked what he was doing. One and a half to two hours a day, he said.

That moment sparked something in me.

Not imitation. Inspiration.

I did not take this as a prescription. I am not about to copy another person’s body, schedule, or capacity. But I did feel something wake up. This morning, I found myself looking for six-week Peloton cycling challenges.

Not because I need another obligation.

Because the game is calling to me again.

The miles. The progress. The points. The structure. The sense of entering a challenge and seeing what I can build.

And there it was, the sentence I had been circling:

Accomplishment is the juice of my life.

Not hustle.

Not vanity.

Not anti-aging.

Not proving.

Just the deep satisfaction of learning, practising, progressing, and seeing evidence that life is still moving through me. That matters because so much of the conversation about aging remains vague.

Be more active. Keep moving. Do what you enjoy.

There is nothing wrong with that advice, but it does not quite name what sustains me.

I am not simply trying to be more active.

I am building capability for the pure joy of it.

Systems give my energy somewhere to go. Capability gives me something to build. Accomplishment gives me evidence that I am still learning, still practising, still becoming.

I am not fighting aging.

I am expressing life.

And at 70, that feels like one of the most honest things I can say.

Capability, for me, is one of the purest joys of being alive.

It is what sustains my life.

I’d love to hear how this lands for you. Hit the Like button below, or let’s continue the conversation in the Comments.

Comment

Every year, Cooly Rocks fills our streets with old cars, 1950s clothes, dancing, music, and people who look as though they know how to have fun.

I usually avoid that part of town during festival week.

Crowds drain me.

Noise drains me.

The logistics alone are enough to send me in the opposite direction. But this year I found myself wondering: what do they know that I might be missing?

I am not drawn to the crowds.

I am drawn to the aliveness.

They all seem to have so much fun. I thought it was worth noticing how they do it. So I decide to go, not as an enthusiast, but as an observer.

It is Day One of the nostalgia festival, and already the precinct feels transformed. The blue sky and winter sunshine, ordered in advance, do not disappoint. The forecast promises more of the same.

Rockers are rolling in. Hot rods are arriving. I am led to believe there will be around 900 classic cars noisily showing off before the weekend is done.

Retired people, and those who wish they were, have begun moving through town in caravans, following the festival circuit from rock and roll to Elvis and back again. Local caravan parks are heaving with excited agers-turned-teenagers. Many have escaped the southern cold to return to the fifties in the subtropics.

This is not simply a festival.

It is a temporary world.

We head to our favourite beachside coffee shop to observe, and find a massive festival set-up already in place. Stage. Dance floor. Marquees. Elvis precinct. Stalls selling everything 1950s.

As far as the eye can see, people are setting up shop with racks of what my granddaughter would call ‘fits’—that’s ‘outfits’ for our generation

Swing dresses with fitted bodices and flared circle skirts designed to spin. Petticoats with volume. Polka dots, gingham checks, cherry motifs, leopard print. Snug cardigans. Peter Pan collars. Proper dance shoes. Bobby socks. Glittering headbands. Ponytail ribbons. Elvis jackets. Marilyn jackets. Even classic 1950s aprons for those drawn to the June Cleaver end of the fantasy.

Everything from the classy to the not-so-classy.

And people are buying.

Shopping bags are already collecting on arms. Show bags from the merchandise tent are added to the haul. The weekend has barely begun, and the transformation is underway.

From my café vantage point, I can see the keen early starters.

One woman is already dressed head to toe in 1950s style, though watching her walk in her fancy 1950s shoes, I’m not sure her feet will survive the weekend. A man walks past with Elvis glittering on the back of his black jacket. Another has slicked-back hair, tattoos, and a stance to match the whole rockabilly mood.

The flared skirts are showing up early, some sensibly paired with sneakers for the first pass through town.

And this is what catches me.

Aging bodies, dressed up and participating.

People stepping into character.

Wearing their passion.

I notice early starters pushing walkers (rollators). The odd walking stick. Even crutches among the early crowd. I see a grandmother pushing a great-grandmother in a wheelchair.

And I wonder whether this is like the Tai Chi elders I sometimes see moving with grace, before returning to a more careful walk once their practice is over.

Maybe some of these people will leave their walkers at the edge of the dance floor and get on with the serious business of a rock-and-roll festival.

Dancing.

After all, movement is life.

There is an air of excitement and expectation building, and the music has not even started. Even the squawking seagulls seem to know something is in the air.

I love the idea of fun.

But my fun identity clearly lives in lycra, sportswear, or hiking gear. Give me a Peloton ride, a walk, a rail trail, a hike through the English countryside, or a body that feels capable, and I understand the pleasure immediately.

This kind of fun is different.

It is public. Theatrical. Noisy. Costumed. Shared.

And, to my surprise, it is not loose or frivolous.

It is structured.

Cooly Rocks is not accidental fun. It is highly organised joy.

They dress the part.

They learn the dances.

They showcase cars.

They polish the chrome.

They gather in the street.

They enter a shared story for a weekend.

That may be what I have underestimated.

I tend to think of structure as something that supports discipline, health, work, training, or self-regulation. I know how to build systems to help me exercise, write, restore, and stay steady.

But here, structure is supporting joy.

Not private joy. Not quiet joy. Not the modest pleasure of a good routine.

Public joy.

That may be what I had not seen before.

The kind that says: here I am, still willing to dress up, show up, move, laugh, remember, exaggerate, perform, and belong.

I am not sure I will ever become a festival person.

My nervous system may always prefer the quieter edge of the action, preferably with a good coffee and a clear path to escape. But I am beginning to see fun as one of the serious practices of aging well.

Not because we need to become someone else.

But because we need to keep finding ways to enter life with more of ourselves.

Even if only for a weekend.

My Favorite Reads this week:

My Social Battery Sent a Resignation Letter by

The Hidden Reason You Feel Cold More Often After 60 by

I Wouldn’t Want to Be 22 Right Now by The Old Grey Thinker

What sustains a life as we age?

There are three movement systems speaking to me right now, and they do not all speak the same language.

Peloton did not just give me exercise. It gave me a way into my day.

My Peloton bike sits beside my desk on a black mat embossed with a big ‘P’, red-and-black bike shoes underneath. It speaks to me. It reminds me how much I love the ease and joy of it: clip in, choose a ride, build a sweat, sing at the top of my voice, high-five others on the ride, and walk away with an endorphin boost that lasts. I feel alive.

Then there’s the nerdy end-of-month tracking. On the first of each month, I check how many minutes I have accumulated toward my goal of 20K minutes of exercise for the year. I record my numbers for cycling, walking, strength, Pilates, yoga, and meditation in a separate spreadsheet from my HRV one.

Did I earn Bronze, Silver, or Gold for each during the month? Oh no, I was a smidge short of Gold. Should have checked that before the end of the month.

This is what pulls me into my day. A whole system that seamlessly drives behaviour. A workout before breakfast. A blue dot accumulating to over 1600 days of continuous exercise.

It’s where I interact with a global community of like-minded fitness enthusiasts. I follow other Peloton grannies, in awe of what some of them are doing. I’m part of a 10,000-strong Facebook group of Peloton over-60s. I even joined a third-party group that curates Peloton rides into challenging six-week programs.

It is my happy place. I had planned to still be inside that system when I turn 90, like Rose, whose family flew her from Chicago to Peloton London to do a studio ride with her favourite instructor for her 90th birthday.

It is not just a bike.

It is a world.

It’s who I am and what I do.

However, over recent years, my body has had a say. Knee tendinopathy slowed me down. Even my beloved hiking started taking a toll.

My 60s humbled me. I had built an identity around the Peloton system, and it was slipping away from me. What was missing?

Two years ago, I came across Vanja.Moves. She was screaming mobility from the rooftops. It is hard to argue that years of sitting have not reduced our mobility. Ankles locked. Hips immovable. Knees have become the victim joint. A perfect storm as we age.

This spoke to me.

Once I saw the truth of mobility, I could not unsee it.

Her answer, amongst all the noise, was simple: squat, hang, crawl, move. This was not just another exercise program. It was a lifestyle to inhabit. The body as something we live in, not just something we train. It expanded my perspective on movement as a way of life.

I purchased her program. I am still doing it two years later.

I learned to squat for one minute, then built to five minutes, then ten at a time, eventually accumulating thirty minutes in a day. Believe me, it does get easier.

Frank fashioned a hang bar on the verandah. Even now, the best I can do is thirty seconds, and my toes are still resting on the ground.

Crawling is interesting. A long way to go.

While watching TV, I sit on the floor to gradually release my ankles, knees, hips, and spine.

But the conflict was real. I just wanted to be a Peloton cyclist, but I could not get the truth of Vanja’s mobility lifestyle out of my head.

Two systems.

Now I had to think, rather than simply be pulled into my day by a Peloton done-for-me exercise plan. Now I had to ask: how do I fit all of this into a day, or even a week?

Then osteoporosis entered the room, and the conversation changed again.

Osteoporosis best practice is lifting heavy and impact training. Peloton dumbbells, and even the recently added Jump training, cannot meet the requirements for building bone density set out in the well-researched Liftmor and Onero programs.

The evidence is strong. The protocol is tested. The necessity is hard to ignore.

I purchased a starter set of barbells, and I am cautiously making progress with deadlifts and squats. But I will need more equipment to progress squats.

So now I have three systems that will not collapse into one simple protocol.

My whole career was built on simplifying systems and creating efficiency. I am an expert at it. And here I am, unable to collapse multiple movement systems into a single, simple answer.

I can no longer reach my monthly Peloton targets. I have had to let it go in favour of impact training like walking, jumping, and stepping. I miss the ease of Peloton.

Movement for life is not a simple system either. It takes extra brain bandwidth. Suddenly, movement is a lifestyle rather than a done-by-breakfast-and-get-on-with-the-day system.

Lifting for bone density requires a gym setup with more than the standard set of barbells I currently have. And I am not sure there is any more space in my house.

The tension is real.

My one beloved system is no longer enough. Capability has become more demanding.

I keep wanting to simplify it into one system I can trust.

One app.

One protocol.

One answer.

But my body keeps refusing that kind of neatness.

Peloton still matters because joy matters.

Vanja matters because mobility is truth.

Onero matters because bones need load, not sentiment.

This may be one of the harder lessons of aging well: not everything that matters can be folded into one elegant system.

Some truths have to stand beside each other.

Peloton pulls me.

Vanja invites me.

Onero obliges me.

But right now, the honest answer is clear.

Bone density has to move to the top of the priority list. Not because it is the system I love most, but because it is the truth my body is asking me to respect.

It’s not an easy ride anymore.

Love to hear what you think. Let’s start a conversation in the comments:

Leave a comment

What sustains a life as we age?

My subscription to Storyworth arrived as a 69th birthday gift from my London-based daughter. What began as a gift of memory has become evidence of a life still unfolding.

My only daughter has such a gift for making memories, spending the past two decades thoughtfully creating traditions for her family.

At the start of every Summer, she would create a ‘Summer List’. A colourfully decorated poster went up on the wall to document activities she planned for her daughter over the Summer holidays, and they would ceremoniously tick it off as they went along.

In addition, before her now 19-year-old daughter started school, she purchased a copy of Dr Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! At the end of every school year, she asked that year’s teacher to write something in the book. This ritual was carried out in secret for 12 years. At her graduation lunch, she presented it to her daughter to mark the beginning of her life’s journey.

Storyworth became another expression of that same instinct for making family memories, this time for me.

Each Monday for a year, Storyworth sent me a question curated by my daughter from the many available options. I had a weekly writing prompt to ponder, to gather long-lost information about, to write about, and to find old photos. 52 stories in total, crafted to form the story of my life so far.

I tried to keep up.

I relied on elderly family members and a couple of family genealogists to help gather information. My sisters remembered trips we took that had clearly been scrubbed from my memory. They even had photos.

I had already collected stories from my mother’s regular ‘Cousins Day’. Each month, the women in her family would gather to tell stories, laugh, and reminisce. I loved being part of what I called ‘Secret Women’s Business’, learning about my maternal ancestry from those gatherings.

The writing was difficult, even raw at times. I had to address parts of my life that didn’t go as planned, as well as the great times and treasured memories.

Some questions were trivial, like: How did you learn to ride a bike?

Some were profound, like: How did you get your name? Mine came from my great-aunt, my father’s sister, who died months before dad was born.

Some were forward-thinking, like writing to my unborn first great-great-grandchild, whom I may never meet.

My daughter peeked at the stories as I wrote and loves her final printed version.

Another copy awaits my son on his next visit. I want to deliver it personally before I hand a copy to his daughter, my other granddaughter, who eagerly awaits the read.

I explained to her that this book is the story of me up to 70.

The rest is still being written.

Not in a hardcover book this time, but in the ordinary days I keep paying attention to. In the walks, the conversations, the questions, the experiments, the moments that make me stop and think: there is something here.

Perhaps this is why the project stayed with me. It sat quietly beside the question I keep returning to now:

What sustains a life?

Storyworth did not simply ask me to remember.

It asked me to notice the shaping of a life.

To look back and see what had formed me.

To gather the fragments.

To make sense of what I could.

To leave a record for the people who come after me.

And then, quietly, it handed the pen back.

Because 70 is not the end of the story.

It is simply the point at which I became more deliberate about writing the next chapter while I am still very much living it.

My Favorite Reads this week:

The Fear That Doesn’t Have a Name by

Mitochondria Are Maternal: A Practice of Mothers by

Goodbye Substack, hello Tuhat by

What sustains a life as we age?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what actually keeps a mind sharp.

Not memory games or brain-training apps.

Something else.

I notice it in the difference between how my mind feels after twenty minutes of scrolling and how it feels after an hour with a difficult book.

Both involve attention.

But they leave behind very different kinds of minds.

Recently, I removed social media apps from my phone.

I realised that every time I sat down for a break, I instantly picked up my phone and started scrolling.

The algorithm had heard me and was feeding me countless influencers explaining how to exercise to fix my osteoporosis.

Valuable information.

Utter overwhelm.

It’s how the algorithm works.

Endless:

3 ways to do this.

4 steps to improve that.

Small bites individually.

Brain scrambling when they arrive together in a scroll.

I just want to see my friends’ and family’s posts, which are now buried under a mountain of irrelevant nonsense. I have to go to their specific account to see what they are doing.

I also deleted 14GB of videos from YouTube. It was quite a collection—so many saved items that I never seemed to get back to.

Drowning in information.

I’ve started to sense the sharp distinction between mind-numbing entertainment and reality. For example:

The Piano UK (and Australia) celebrates ordinary people with extraordinary talent and connection to the piano. Some are great pianists, but there are some who simply reach in and touch our souls.

We could watch this show, shed some tears and move on with our day.

But paying attention sometimes means stopping long enough to sense the difference between what is deeply real,

what is merely performative,

and what is simply noise.

I am tired of allowing others to filter the world for me.

I want to notice what is deeply real for me and connect without assistance.

Right now, I sit on my front deck, coffee in hand, loving the sunshine between incessant rain showers, writing. I pause to watch our bees fly in and then fly out of the hive before turning left onto their well-worn flight path. I wonder how they keep going in the rain—how far do they have to go for nectar at this time of year? I am fascinated by the little dance they perform at the entrance to the hive to efficiently direct their fellow bees to the best nectar. Bees inspire curiosity and awe in spades if we stop long enough to notice.

I find myself sitting and writing these sorts of mundane scenes more often. It’s my practice of connecting with what is real.

In addition, I now read writers who challenge my ability to pay attention, adding layers of interest to what I see and how I see it.

I want to take a sentence and notice it in my world.

I want to see how patterns of different ideas collide to build stronger and deeper perspectives.

I want to be able to hold different ideas without collapsing them into simplicity.

I want to see and write what is actually there.

I want to see rather than just look.

Perhaps sharpness has less to do with consuming more information

and more to do with learning to pay deeper attention to what is already here.

I am a sitter.

I have always been a sitter.

My sister and I joke that we are sitters.

We read, we write, and we sit.

Don’t get me wrong. I exercise every day. I earn a blue dot on Peloton before breakfast. I close my Apple Watch rings every day and have done so for thousands of consecutive days.

But then I sit.

My watch reminds me every hour that I need to stand, and I dutifully obey.

Then I sit again.

I used to think exercise and movement were the same thing. If I rode my Peloton, closed my rings, and completed my daily workout, I considered the box ticked.

And in one sense, it was.

I was exercising consistently, and that mattered. But increasingly, I began to notice a contradiction. I could complete a tough ride before breakfast and still spend most of the day in a chair. An hour of exercise did not change the fact that I was living as a sitter.

My husband, by contrast, seems constitutionally incapable of staying still for long. He is always up—carrying, fixing, walking, rearranging, building.

Movement is woven into the fabric of his day.

For him, movement is not an appointment.

It is a way of life.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

Exercise is something we do. Movement is how we inhabit the world.

What if, instead of confining movement to a scheduled workout, we began to weave it into the ordinary moments of the day?

For years, watching television meant sinking into a comfortable lounge for the evening. Recently, I have started doing something different.

I sit on the floor.

Beside me is a small list of options: Seiza, 90/90, cross-legged with a cushion, a supported W-sit, a passive squat. None is particularly impressive, and none is held for long. The point is simply to ask a little more of my hips, knees, ankles, and spine than the sofa ever would.

It is still sitting, but there is a difference.

The television program is the same, but my body is doing different work.

My hips are letting go.

My ankles are opening.

My spine is adjusting.

And when the program ends, I have to get back up again.

Nothing dramatic has happened. It’s still sitting.

But I am no longer asking so little of my body. That is exactly the kind of shift that fascinates me:

Same circumstance.

Different relationship.

Different outcome.

The body, remarkably, responds to what life demands of it. If life demands little more than sitting and occasional workouts, the body adapts accordingly.

But if life regularly requires getting up and down from the floor, carrying awkward loads, climbing steps, balancing, squatting, reaching, and walking, the body receives a very different message.

Build this.

Strengthen that.

Prepare for more.

Nothing about this is dramatic.

It is simply a shift in how I think about daily life.

Not exercise as a task to complete, but movement as a continuous conversation with the body.

A reminder that capability is not only built in workouts.

Capability is often built in ways that look almost too ordinary to matter.

It is built in what we repeatedly ask of ourselves.

And perhaps that is one of the most important questions of aging:

What does my everyday life require of my body?

Because the body, as it turns out, is always listening.

My Favorite Reads this week:

Old Age Is Just One Damn Thing After Another by

Love is about being invested in someone’s continual expansion by

Are Older Lives Worth Less? by

For much of my life, I was convinced agency meant taking control.

I set bold goals.

I made strategic and tactical plans.

I shaped life into the form I wanted.

It was exhausting.

As I have grown older, my understanding has changed. Agency no longer feels like control. It feels more like engagement.

Paying attention to what is actually there.

Participating in the world around me.

Responding to what life presents.

Building the capabilities that allow me to keep responding.

This is not a strategy I adopted all at once. It emerged gradually, through small daily practices of noticing. I started jotting down ‘Field Notes’. And over time, patterns emerged. The invisible became visible. Those practices have changed the way I live.

Some of these practices are outward-facing. A conversation at the market. A familiar face on the walking path. The woman at Woolworths wearing sparkly brooches above her name tag that says Mary. The countless small encounters that ask nothing of me, yet draw me into the world.

I have come to think of this as participation without obligation. A way of being involved without needing to control the outcome.

Other practices are more personal.

Each morning, I record my HRV, sleep, exercise, and other health markers in a spreadsheet I have maintained for years. What began as a way of tracking numbers became something more important.

A daily act of attention.

A quiet conversation with reality.

Not an attempt to control every variable, but a way of staying engaged with what is true.

Together, these practices create a particular stance toward life.

They keep me curious.

Responsive.

Ready to be ready.

I’ve also come to realise that noticing is not a single skill. It is a family of attentions that keeps us in contact with reality.

Sometimes it is observational—simply seeing what is happening around us.

Sometimes it is embodied—sensing what is happening in the body.

Sometimes it is relational—recognising what another person might need.

Sometimes it is pattern noticing—seeing trends over time in a spreadsheet, a habit, or a relationship.

Sometimes it is systemic—understanding how larger structures shape what is possible.

Sometimes it is capability noticing—seeing what supports or erodes our ability to respond.

And sometimes it is coherence noticing—recognising when life is working well.

These forms of noticing may look different, but they all serve the same purpose. They help us stay in touch with what is real. And from that contact, agency becomes possible.

As I look back over these past few essays, I can see that agency begins much earlier than action.

It begins with attention. With the willingness to notice what is here.

To participate where we can.

To remain engaged with reality rather than retreat into abstraction or control.

This is how I live now. A life built on noticing.

And perhaps that is what aging well ultimately requires.

Not mastery over life,

but the capacity to keep noticing, responding, and participating—

one small act of attention at a time.

A cool change came through overnight, signalling winter is on its way. I say winter, but where we live, it is the best season. Clear blue skies, no humidity and temperatures that attract Southerners in their droves.

We head to a different outdoor coffee shop beside the beach—our Friday coffee ritual, taking advantage of a weekday before the weekend crowds and a week of forecast rain.

There’s a sneaky south-westerly breeze.

We bag sought-after comfy lounges to sit and soak up the warmth. Half in the shade and half in the sun. Under the Pandanus tree, careful not to be directly under the soccer ball-sized seed pods.

The ocean is the main event today. Waves roll in and lap the sand, slowly, rhythmically. There’s a sun glitter, a shimmering blanket of broken mirrors all the way to the horizon. An endless canopy of cerulean blue, the only flaw—wispy clouds just above the horizon, gently being moved north.

One of those days when you don’t want to be anywhere else.

Lots of people who don’t have to be anywhere else on a Friday are enjoying a moment and a coffee in the sunshine. The bike path is behind me at this location. My attention is front and centre on the panoramic ocean view. A few swimmers brave not the water temperature but the breeze on wet skin as they return from their swim. The lone sunbather takes her pretty pink-and-white striped umbrella down to use as a windbreak.

A surfer on a powered keeled board enjoys a fairly flat surf. Wetsuit-clad surfers sit out past the breakers, waiting for a lazy wave. Closer to shore, particularly noisy seagulls and long-billed ibis peck in the sand for food. A toddler chases them.

Noisy building renovation at the surf clubhouse is only a minor interruption.

People come and go. I am glued to my spot.

My legs heat up from the sun beating down on them. Tan lines start to outline the shape of my sandals on my feet.

Batman and Mum sit down beside us. He takes off his cape. I tell him I could be his Robin, but he quickly turns into shy Bruce Wayne.

What draws me to this scene? Sublime natural beauty. Serenity. A magnificent ‘Sit and Soak’ moment.

It’s white space. It’s slow-living. It’s why everyone wants to move here.

And yet, as I sit there, another thought slips in.

It feels almost self-indulgent to allow myself to luxuriate in a morning like this.

To sit for hours with a coffee and nowhere urgent to be.

To watch light shimmer on the water.

To feel the sun warming my legs.

To let time pass without trying to make it productive.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to justify our time.

To be useful. To be efficient. To keep moving.

Especially those of us who’ve spent decades managing households, raising children and solving problems.

There is always something that needs doing, which is why it can feel strangely uncomfortable to simply sit and soak. But perhaps this, too, is part of aging well.

Staying fully alive is not only about preserving muscle, bone, and function.

It is also about protecting our capacity to be absorbed by beauty.

To sit without urgency.

To notice what restores us.

To remember that life is more than maintenance.

Staying strong matters.

Staying sharp matters.

But all of it is in service of something larger.

The ability to sit in the sun, watch light shimmer on the water, and feel fully present to the life we have. Moments like this remind us why we want to remain capable in the first place.

Not simply to live longer.

But to stay fully alive.

Favorite reads this week:

More Kinds of Exercise. Not Just More. by

Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process by

Talking to Old People by

It will be eight years this month since I began measuring my HRV (heart rate variability) every day. This morning, my streak reached 2,910 days. What began as a single number has grown into a daily spreadsheet that now includes sleep, Apple Watch data, exercise, grip strength, VO₂ max, and the supplements I take.

Each morning, I enter the numbers and colour-code cells that warrant attention. At the end of each month, I update the graphs and save a backup of the file. I have worked with spreadsheets since they were invented, and I still love them. What started as a way of taking control of my life has become part of the rhythm of my mornings. How many columns can you have in one spreadsheet? I have no idea, but I am testing it.

What do I do with all these numbers?

In one sense, not much.

I collect them, cast my eye over the patterns, and notice which cells have turned orange or red. Sometimes I find myself quietly tut-tutting. More often, I simply think, Isn’t that interesting?

I do not analyse every fluctuation. I do not need to.

Over time, the data has become familiar. By glancing over it each morning, I get a feel for where I am and then move on with my day. Once a month, I look at my graphs and wonder, with a mixture of curiosity and respect, whether aging is beginning to leave its mark.

Late last year, while I was immersed in writing and publishing, my normally very high HRV dropped by almost twenty points. I was taking on new technology, navigating Amazon’s systems, and trying to operate at a scale that felt increasingly demanding. The cognitive load was high.

The data was flashing red.

The first time we built an Amazon business, it served us well, and I thought I would do it again as I approached 70, just for fun. And I did do it, but it came with a cost.

I am no longer prepared to jeopardise my health when I don’t have to.

So, instead of using artificial intelligence to churn out more books like everyone else on the writing program I was doing, I chose to use it to help me become a better writer. And instead of trying to compete at global scale, I chose to work at small-scale within a global platform. That is what Substack offers—a place to write thoughtfully, connect directly, and develop my own voice.

And I continue to take notice of the quiet dashboard running in the background of my life, staying in touch with reality through a daily practice of noticing, adjusting, and continuing. When the colours on my spreadsheet shift, I respond quickly to restore equilibrium.

But over time, I have come to see that the spreadsheet represents something more.

Agency is often described as the ability to act.

But noticing and engagement are what make agency durable—the willingness to remain involved, to pay attention, to notice patterns, to make small course corrections, so that you can keep participating in what really matters.

My spreadsheet may look like a collection of numbers, but it is really a record of an ongoing relationship with myself.

A way of staying curious.

A way of staying responsive.

A way of staying ready to be ready…

And perhaps that is what agency becomes as we age—not a single decisive act, but a quiet commitment to keep noticing what is happening and to respond while we still can.

I watched The Piano UK and cried all the way through. So when The Piano Australia arrived, I was hesitant to delve back into deep emotion.

A couple of years on, with nothing to watch, I decide to dive in.

While there are some deeply moving younger participants, I focus on aging guests.

The Evergreens are a group of aging women.

They arrive dressed uniformly in navy pants and shamrock-green jackets, adorned with sparkling brooches, beautifully contrasted against the neutral urban palette.

They introduce themselves to the camera with ‘We are the Evergreens’ in unison with bright ear-to-ear smiles.

‘You’ve got a choice in life—you can grow old and grow grey or stay green like green shoots.’

A backstory reveals just how close their friendship is.

We watch Barb 80, Bev 81, Dell 75, and Christine, the baby, at 68, rustle up a morning tea spread that makes your mouth water, laughing and joking like sisters.

Four women playing piano together in Sydney’s biggest railway station, before commuters, TV cameras, and two expert pianists searching for participants to mentor for a concert at the end of the series.

Compere Amanda takes their handbags.

They take their place at the piano, just enough room for them all. We watch 4 sets of hands create delightful music: Galop-Marche for Eight Hands by Lavignac. Hands cross over each other. Someone turns the page. It all happens seamlessly.

The experts are shocked but impressed, asking if there is a leader, but decide they are just ‘having a conversation with their hands’

The music is pure joy.

Not performance.

Friendship made audible.

It captivates commuters. People have missed their trains for that, says Amanda

Bill is 103, tall, quite bent over, leaning on his walker, accompanied by his daughter, Sue, carrying his music.

Sue tells us that his hearing is getting worse, his sight is failing, but when he plays the piano, he comes to life.

‘Playing the piano, I have something to hang onto.’

‘If I didn’t have the piano, it would be difficult to exist.’

He plays Love Is Here To Stay by Gershwin for us.

Amanda comments that he didn’t read the music.

‘No, it’s too dark here in the station, but it’s inside me.’

As he walks away, he comments on ‘how genuine they were with their warmth’.

Michael is 76. His wife of 51 years, Viesha, is in aged care. He proudly produces a picture of her. We’ve done everything together, soul mates. They have 4 beautiful girls and their families.

He is lonely.

‘The house seems so utterly empty. Staring into darkness where there used to be light.’

‘I am so fortunate to have had my music. I can play any piano at any time. It helps.’

‘I love going to the aged care facility to play for my wife, to share with her a bit of what we’ve lost.’

He plays “Aeolian Harp” Étude, Op. 25, No. 1 by Chopin, with a photo of Viesha on the piano to remind him of what really matters. Passion and love fill the station.

‘The piano is an essential part of my life. It’s like breathing.’

Watching them, I realise this isn’t really about music.

It’s about attachment to life.

About the things that still pull a person forward.

Friendship. Practice. Beauty. Memory. Love.

Something waiting for you on the other side of the night.

The piano gives each of them more than something to do.

It gives them somewhere to place themselves.

A reason to enter the day.

And maybe that’s the deeper question I keep circling as I age:

Not simply how to stay fit and healthy.

But what keeps a person connected to being alive.

My favourite reads this week:

You don’t have a writing problem. You have a seeing problem. by

Why the Wealthiest Suburbs Have the “Worst” Attention Spans by

I’ve Got It: The Case for Carrying Your Own Weight by

It’s wet and cold. Autumn has arrived. Of course. It always does—just in time for Anzac Day.

Yesterday, Frank told me about our new neighbour, Izzy, and her serious medical challenges.

Anzac bikkies felt like the only possible response.

I went shopping. Bought the ingredients. Made the bikkies.

Took a batch over.

She was so grateful.

She filled me in on her actual situation—much worse than she’d told Frank.

I patted and stroked Rufus, their annoyingly barking dog, while she told me the whole story. He lapped up the attention.

She is just 32, with three small girls.

Her mother, Stacey, is staying to help. Her sister too.

Life can be unbearably cruel.

Walking home, I realised I felt… kind. A word I would never have used for myself before.

I hadn’t set out to be kind. I’d simply acted.

We notice things like this all the time.

A neighbour struggling. A stranger having an off day. Someone just slightly out of place in the flow of things.

Mostly, we keep moving.

Not out of indifference—just habit. It’s not our role. We don’t want to intrude. There’s a quiet assumption that someone else will handle it.

But sometimes, something shifts.

The noticing doesn’t stay contained.

It moves.

And before you’ve quite decided, you’ve stepped into it.

I didn’t take responsibility for her situation. I didn’t stay or try to fix anything.

I stepped in, briefly. Then stepped back out.

Participation, without obligation.

It’s not the only time.

At Woolworths, picking up ingredients for those same Anzac bikkies, Mary is at the checkout.

An old timer at Woolies. I call her by name. I’ve never done that before.

I comment on the brooches pinned to her uniform—coloured stones that remind me of my grandmother.

She lights up.

Just for a moment, the transaction shifts.

More human. Slightly off-script.

Attention sometimes does that.

Now I’m back in my own life.

Rain on the garden. The smell of biscuits still in the kitchen. An afternoon with my book.

The same life.

But not quite the same.

Julia tells us about the craft mornings she has started in the common room of her retirement village.

They weren’t part of a program. No committee. No formal approval.

She simply noticed that some women rarely left their rooms.

So she invited them.

A table. Some materials. A reason to come down.

Now the room is alive on those mornings—conversation, laughter, hands busy with small things. The kind of activity that doesn’t look like much from the outside, but changes the feel of a place from within.

They come. They love it.

A man complains. He comes to the common room expecting quiet. Instead, he finds himself surrounded by women talking, moving, engaging.

It’s not what he wants from the space.

Julia tells him he could find somewhere else to sit.

Management steps in.

They don’t look at the room. They don’t see the women. They reach for the rules.

Discrimination policy. Shared space. Equal access.

Julia is read the guidelines.

Nothing unusual in this. In fact, it’s exactly what we expect.

Systems are designed to be fair.

They rely on rules to ensure consistency.

At that level, the situation is straightforward:

• one group using a shared space

• another resident objecting

• a need to apply policy evenly

The system can see all of that clearly. But something else is happening here.

Something that doesn’t register at that level.

At small-scale, Julia can see what those mornings actually mean.

Not a “craft group.”

A point of entry.

A reason to leave the room.

A place to sit with others.

A way back into participation.

She can see the difference between noise and life.

She can see what is changing for those women.

The system can’t.

Not because it’s badly designed.

But because it’s not designed to see that kind of thing.

Rules work by generalising.

They flatten situations into categories:

• fair/unfair

• compliant/non-compliant

• allowed/not allowed

They have to. That’s how they scale.

But life doesn’t organise itself that way.

What sustains a life is rarely general. It’s specific. Local. Contextual.

A particular room. A particular group of people. A particular moment where something shifts from isolation to connection.

This is the tension.

At scale, the system sees policy.

At small-scale, a person sees what’s needed.

It shows up everywhere once you start noticing it.

In aged care systems that assess needs through forms and categories.

In organisations where decisions are made far from the people they affect.

In any setting where consistency is prioritised over context.

And yet, we need systems.

Without them, there is no structure, no coordination, no shared framework to operate within.

The problem isn’t that systems exist. It’s that they inevitably lose sight of what can only be seen up close. Which leaves us with a question.

Not how to fix the system. But how to live within it.

Because at some point, someone has to do what Julia did.

Notice.

Act.

Create something small and specific that works in this place, with these people, now.

Something that doesn’t require permission to begin.

Something that makes a difference at the level where life is actually lived.

The system may or may not accommodate it. It may reshape it, restrict it, or override it entirely. That part isn’t always in our control.

But the act itself matters.

Because it restores something that large systems can’t provide:

The ability to see clearly.

To respond appropriately.

To care in a way that fits the situation.

The common room becomes alive for a few hours.

Women who stayed in their rooms come out.

Conversation happens.

Hands move.

Something shifts.

From the outside, it’s just a craft group.

From within, it’s something else entirely.

At scale, the system can only see policy.

At small-scale, Julia intuitively knows what sustains a life.

My favourite reads this week:

You Set It Down So Gently You Didn’t Hear It Go by

Aging Gracefully by

11 Must-Read Books That Will Change Your Life by

We’re sitting at our beachside café, coffee in front of us, watching the morning pass. People move through in that familiar rhythm—walkers, cyclists, the occasional runner. It’s a scene I know well. I’ve watched it unfold many times. Nothing to notice today.

And yet, something feels off.

I find myself thinking:

There’s something wrong with this scene.

It’s not a strong reaction. Just a quiet sense that something doesn’t quite fit. It takes a moment to register. Nothing obvious. No disruption, no noise. Just a slight misalignment I can’t quite place.

Then it lands.

It’s e-bikes.

They move differently. Faster, yes—but not just faster. Detached, somehow. The effort doesn’t match the motion. The rhythm is different. I watch a few glide past, barely turning the pedals. Another rider comes through faster than expected, weaving between walkers.

And my mind starts to fill in the gap.

Not human-powered.

Speed without effort.

I’d felt it in my body before I could name it.

A slight tightening.

A leaning forward.

A small shift, but it changed the way I viewed the scene.

What was open had narrowed slightly.

I realised I was no longer just watching. I was tracking randomity. Who’s moving through. How fast. Where they’ll go next. What was passing became something to anticipate.

And then, just as quietly, something eased. Not because I decided to change it. Not because I’d worked anything out. I simply stopped holding it so tightly. The need to make sense of it dropped away, almost on its own.

And I was back to watching. The same riders passing through. But now I noticed different things. The way someone sits upright, relaxed. Another rider a little tentative, still finding their balance. A couple talking as they move, unhurried despite the speed.

Not something to agree with or resist. Just a mix of people moving through the same shared space in different ways.

And the scene felt… lighter.

It felt like a different kind of attention.

One that stays a little longer. It didn’t tighten the moment. It let it open.

Long enough for more of the scene to show itself.

The coffee was still warm. The morning continued around us. The same path. The same mix of walkers and riders. But something had shifted in how I was sitting here. Less inclined to decide. More willing to be present.

Instead of thinking: I have to do something about this

I just found myself thinking: isn’t that interesting

We were just about to leave. Chairs pushed back, cups empty, that small pause before standing up.

Then I saw him turn. Not a big movement—just enough to lose his balance. You could see it happening. That moment where the body doesn’t quite catch up with itself.

I was already moving when he fell.

His head hit the concrete with a crack that made everyone look up. For a second, no one spoke. Then people were there—six of us, maybe more. It took three to get him up. Even then, he wobbled badly, almost going down again before two men steadied him and got him into a chair. There was a small cut on his head. Not too bad. But enough to remind you how hard concrete is.

We drifted back to our table. No one really said anything. It didn’t feel like the same morning anymore.

I went over to check on him.

His name is Roy. Eighty-five. He comes here most days, he said. We’ve seen him before, though we’d never spoken. He was waiting for his coffee. He mentioned, almost casually, that it was his second fall that day.

Second!

Frank asked him about seeing a doctor. About getting a walker. Roy listened, nodded, answered. There was talk of a knee replacement—public system, long wait. It will take as long as it takes.

His coffee arrived. He wrapped his hands around the cup as if everything was back in place.

We left him there.

On our way home, I said to Frank—it’s not our job to take over his agency. He agreed.

But it sits with you, that line between helping and stepping in too far.

We’ll look for him next time we’re there.

Frank walked on ahead, as he always does—already thinking about what he’d do when we got home. He’s still capable of most things he sets his mind to. But I can see now that it costs him more.

He doesn’t like that part.

The effort. The need to build strength deliberately, not just rely on it being there.

I don’t say anything about it. At home, I do my strength training. Nothing complicated. Just steady, regular work.

The sort of thing that doesn’t look like much.

Until the day it is.

Favourite reads this week:

Ageing Reimagined: Clearing Space for Your Own Thinking by

Pearls, Porpoises and Cormorants by

Staying Strong & Active for Healthy Aging by

After I wrote last week’s post about noticing again, something didn’t sit quite right. It all sounded a bit… easy. As if paying attention was just a matter of deciding to do it. Slowing down. Taking things in.

And sometimes, it is. But not always.

Because there’s another kind of attention I know well. The kind that doesn’t feel like openness at all. It feels like bracing.

Hyper-vigilance

I feel it high in my chest. My eyes look—No, it’s not my eyes. It’s my feelers, sensing danger. I rely on intellect to override it. Thinking, instead of allowing my beingness to be present. If I let it go, I might revert—say the wrong thing, make a fool of myself. There’s history in that. Emotional residue from mistakes. Social missteps that landed harder than they should have.

I don’t trust I’ll say the right thing.

So I become someone else. Someone more acceptable. More “right.” It happens most with people I don’t know well. And afterwards—I replay everything. For hours. Sometimes days. Every moment examined. This is life, in some ways, on the spectrum. It’s why I stepped away from corporate life. The toll was too high.

So when I talk about paying attention, this is part of what I mean. Attention hasn’t always been neutral for me. It hasn’t felt like openness.

And that kind of attention is exhausting. Not in a dramatic way. It doesn’t announce itself. But it sits in the body. A low-level readiness. A sense that something important could be missed if you relax too much.

Which makes something else make sense.

Why it’s so easy to slip into that soft fog. Why people move through spaces without really taking anything in. It’s not always disinterest.

Sometimes, it’s relief. Relief from having to track, interpret, anticipate. Relief from the effort of holding attention open. Better to narrow the field. Focus on the task. Get through. There’s a kind of kindness in that, even if it looks like absence from the outside.

I can see both patterns in myself.

The tendency to over-attend—to notice everything, hold everything, stay alert.

And the tendency to do the opposite—to switch off, narrow down, move through without letting much in.

Neither one feels quite right.

So when I talk about noticing now, I’m not talking about going back. I’m not interested in living on guard. I’ve done that.

What I’m feeling my way towards is something quieter. An attention that doesn’t come with tension. That doesn’t assume there’s something to manage or resolve. That lets things register without immediately assigning meaning or consequence.

It’s unfamiliar.

There’s still a moment where relaxing attention feels like I might miss something important. As if stepping out of vigilance is a kind of risk. But alongside that, there’s something else.

A sense of space.

Of not having to hold the whole room in my awareness. Of being able to meet what’s in front of me—and trust that if something matters, I’ll meet that too.

I’m not all the way there.

But at least now I can tell the difference.

Not all attention is the same.

Some of it narrows your world.

Some of it lets it open again.

If you’re new, this piece will give you a feel for what this publication is about.

That’s what I’ve become interested in.

Not aging as a concept. Not longevity as a goal.

But what actually holds up—and what doesn’t—as we move through our later decades.

I see it in small places.

At a market. On a walk, when balance or energy shifts.

Some people stay engaged. Others slowly step back.

Alongside that, I’m working on it myself.

Building strength. Maintaining capacity. Testing what helps—and what doesn’t.

Not perfectly. But deliberately.

Over time, a pattern is emerging:

What you pay attention to shapes what you see. What you see shapes what you’re willing to act on. And what you act on becomes your capability.

I’m not here with a fixed system.

I’m here to live the question in public—and share what holds up.

If that interests you—you’re in the right place.

It’s Saturday morning. Summer is hanging on. Frank is tired. Weeks of working up and down on the new deck have caught up with him—knees niggling, energy low in a way that doesn’t quite lift with a good night’s sleep.

When I ask if he wants to do the hill walk, he hesitates. Just for a moment. Then: yes.

He still assumes capability, even when it’s doubtful in the moment—as if the body will follow where the decision has already gone.

We climb the hill, admiring new park renovations, noticing new house renovations. I sense his discomfort and we slow. The top of the hill can’t come soon enough. Then, relief.

Down to flat ground, we cut through the shopping centre to shave distance, along the main street past cafes gearing up for a busy day, to the final stretch along the edge of the creek. We reach the boardwalk, and we pause.

On the right, the red brick public housing unit block sits in full view of it all—easily the best position in town. It irritates Frank every time we pass. Someone, he says, holding the view others would pay dearly for.

In the front unit, the man is there. He always is.

We have walked past him for twenty-five years and have never known his name. He would be about my age. He sits on a chair on his tiny, cluttered front porch, facing the creek. Always has. His body has changed over time—heavier, softer, less held together. Teeth missing. A life that looks, from the outside, like it has narrowed.

And yet his position has not changed.

From that chair, he has watched the creek live its life. Tides pulling in and out. Boats easing down the slipway. Fishermen gutting their catch at the sink. Pelicans waiting, patient, for what remains.

He has watched the path too. Thousands of people passing. Most of them not seeing him at all.

We do. We say Good Morning. He answers, every time.

No more than that. No conversation. No history exchanged. But something passes between us that is enough.

This morning, the contrast sits more sharply.

Frank beside me, pushing gently against a body that is beginning to push back. Still choosing the hill. Still assuming he can.

And the man on the deck, who no longer moves into the day in that way, but has not left it either.

One carries himself forward into the world. The other remains where the world comes to him.

Both are still here.

We walk on, the creek moving beside us as it always does, and I find myself wondering not how long capability lasts, but what shape a life takes when it begins to change—and what it means, then, to remain inside that life.

Favourite Reads this week:

Living Arrangements by

Be the Master of Your Own Destiny by

The To Do Lists by