art of aging

It was my 54th birthday recently. You might argue even caring about your birthday is a bit babyish, but I like the marking of time with some kind of ritual. And so I had been out for a lively night to celebrate.

A lively night? I know, I know. My lexicon is contracting into a formality that I used to laugh at in older people. Observing a new pair of fashionable shoes, my Mum or Granny would describe them as “fun”, “smart” or “trendy” and my brother and
I would roll our eyes. Now I look at just such a pair of shoes and have to choose between the aforementioned old-person speak or outdated hip adjectives – “cool”, “funky”. I could try on a piece of contemporary vernacular, but the word “peng” sits as comfortably in my mouth as expletives in a nun’s.

Despite the “lively night”, I had a problem. For the first time ever I had felt not a flicker or a flutter of birthday feelings before, during or after the event. My 79-year-old father texted to ask me if I’d had a happy birthday and I huffily answered that it had been rubbish. “Welcome to adulthood,” he texted back.

The American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology describes adulthood, n. as “the period of human development in which full physical growth and maturity have been achieved and certain biological, cognitive, social, personality, and other changes associated with the ageing process occur.”

What does that mean? Adulthood is difficult to define. It definitely doesn’t happen at the 16th, 18th or even 21st year and certainly it did not for me. I floundered and failed at the traditional markers for adulthood like marriage, financial independence, parenthood, work. 

The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that regulates impulse control, emotions and many other things that can be reduced to one summary unscience-y word: sensibleness. It is also the last part of the human brain to reach maturity, at 25 or more. Definitely or more in my case. My age is more than double that, and even now that I have grey hair and no longer menstruate I still wonder, really, am I a proper grown-up or just a womanbaby? 

But I know I am aged and ageing, and there’s less years to live now than have been lived, unless by some miracle I live to 108.  Yet even though every one of us is walking towards death for me, at 54, it’s not scary, exactly. It just, is. I keep thinking of the last 30 years, since I was in my early twenties, and it’s gone so fast. Time seems to move faster the older I get. Time is relative. Don’t you remember how long a day was when you were eight? The speed of time sure sharpens the mind. 

I know people who do everything they can to fight it with pills and injections and frantic longevity antics, and they seem a bit hyperactive and deranged. In aiming to prolong life, they seem awfully detached from living it. I want a long and healthy life but that doesn’t mean trying to run away from getting older because, truthfully, it feels all right.

It feels more all right than it did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. How, I can’t say neatly.  There’s a trend at the moment for women to shout loudly about how wonderful it is to be middle-aged, and how confident/sexy/empowered they feel. I thought hard about this and could not in all honesty join their ranks. 

Which does not mean I don’t enjoy being this age, it’s just not exactly for those reasons. What’s beautiful about it is I’ve developed an incredibly strong sense of selfhood away from all the daft, noisy and neurotic flappy attachments of personality. I’m not some meditating yogi but I can sit and distinguish between all that scritchy-scratchy business and the purity of something more constant. Is it a soul. Is it the steady pilot light of existence, whatever it is is it is still, like the eye of a storm.

Some days I feel absolutely crap. I still get things wrong – constantly, all the bloody time – but my ability to sit with things is infinitely changed by age and experience. Right now my life is not the best it has ever been. I have on occasion in the past been heaped with praise, had insanely good sex, flirted with incredibly exciting men. I’ve travelled well and had cash to burn and a wardrobe of lovely things. I long for those days sometimes. I miss them. The past is gone, the future can’t be known. Stuff is irrelevant. Gossip is gibberish. Love is eternal. Hate is pain. Happiness is transitory. Acceptance is peace, an animal companion is the door to another world, and a good night’s sleep is the best drug you will ever take. I just know this now. In short, I am earthed.

While you do change a great deal as you grow in years it is not as simple as, “Yay, I feel wonderful about myself,” which is an uncomplicated sort of sentiment that verges on toxic positivity. I’m not going to be sharing thoughts so asinine that they require a cheesy library photo of a middle-aged woman jumping on a trampoline (because I know how the middle-aged pelvic floor would react to that particular activity).

That there’s happiness and joy in getting older is not precisely it – it’s more that you possess serenity, perspective and calm. Life stays challenging. In some ways it’s harder than it has ever been and I still, at times, feel acute self-doubt. But there is certain knowledge that if you stay steady through the crappy bits and don’t allow it to consume or define you, then it will inevitably be replaced by something else. As the old Persian saying goes, this too shall pass. 

Henry Ford, the man who gave the motor car to the people, said, “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” Mostly, now, that’s how I feel. Sometimes I look at the peachy juiciness of youth and it hurts that I’ve lost that. I’d be lying if I said I spent my time giddy and ecstatic about being a grown-up. But I don’t mind. 

I treasure my body and physical health; relaxing into my age does not entail letting it all go. But I don’t feel a need to look, act or feel young. I want just to be. In other cultures with perhaps less advanced women’s rights movements than we have, age gives older women power and agency they never had before. Vogue Philippines put a wrinkled 106-year-old on its cover and it was truly a beautiful image. It’s ironic, really, that in the West, where we are meant to be so advanced, age is something women try to disguise like it’s shameful.

We don’t believe in anything, so all we can focus on is the glory of youth. The symbol of ouroboros, the snake perpetually eating its own tail, has symbolised the cycle of life since the Egyptians. I saw it painted on the side of white ceremonial hall with a straw thatch roof where 20 years ago I waited with a Swiss photographer to meet one of the most powerful figures in voodoo. 

We went to the Ouidah Festival of Voodoo, or La fête nationale du vodoun as they call it in French-speaking Benin.  All the iterations of voodoo around the world practised today originated here in the old pre-colonial Dahomey kingdom. The coastal town of Ouidah is known as the “cradle of voodoo”. It is an intense place to visit.  A memorial called La Porte du Non Retour looks out to sea. Ouidah was one of the most active ports in the barbaric transatlantic trade in men, women and children. It was these poor souls who spread voodoo to the Caribbean, Brazil and America.

Voodoo’s such a deep part of west African culture and largely misunderstood. I am not an expert, and was just an observer of it 20 years or more ago. But something struck me about voodoo that has grown more and more interesting as I’ve got older. 

We live in a secular world, and I am happy with that. But while voodoo has just one god, it also has many, many spirits that exist in all things. It exists in a world that is alive, what we call animism, and there’s power, symbolism and magic in the trees, the wind, a rock, a snail; the dead and our ancestors live among us; creatures have power. The voodoo world has an inordinately different substance to ours, its practitioners are entwined with the world and with nature. 

Voodoo also throws the best parties. Dancing can fill you, literally, with spirit. And you never, ever want to stop dancing. The festival at Ouidah was fascinating. It was also a blast.

I don’t want to convert to voodoo, I barely scratched the surface of the surface of it back then. But it has something to it that we have lost, and that, as I get older, I want to recover. Capitalism, Civilisation and the Enlightenment and all that jazz have given us wonderful things but destroyed our very long-lived human instinct to worship nature and see magic in things. 

What we got out of it was a great sense of superiority, and an anthropocentric idea of ourselves as special and different. When we so clearly aren’t. We are just one animal on a planet full of living things. But instead of immersing in the world we are a part of, our attention is gripped by stuff we can buy in shops and the cult of youth. 

As I have got older, I can see our luxurious but rather sad modern voodoo everywhere and it doesn’t seem very smart. We don’t have 100 divinities. We have desirable brands; we don’t worship pits full of pythons for their power to change, we have needles full of Botox and filler to do it for us. What is a Gucci thing or a chunky piece of real estate compared to a tree or a magical dream? Our modern world is like voodoo;, it creates fetish from inert objects. We never stopped fetishising things. We live with a commodified sort of animism.

As you drive around Benin you see these funny little roadside shrines, mud hillocks with old teeth and hair and shells for eyes and sometimes splashed with blood. These are fetishes, a sort of shrine endowed with power. 

A few years ago, not long after I turned 50, I decided to go grey. The decreasing space between appointments was proportionate to the widening gap between my real hair colour and the dyed one. This is going to become a ball and chain, I thought. Was it worth it? For a few days after a visit to the colourist I felt reborn, and then time sprouted a new millimetre, centimetre, inch of pewter. I could not figure out why I bothered to pretend my hair was not grey. It seemed a cultural tradition and I couldn’t be arsed with it. This was not pampering or anything good, it was a treadmill.

Why bother?

For whom was I on this treadmill?

You know those scenes in films that stay with you and haunt your evolving self all through life? It’s 30 years since I saw that final scene of Visconti’s Death in Venice. The great Dirk Bogarde’s hair drips sweat and black dye on to his white suit as he slumps on Venice’s Lido beach and breathes his last gazing at the young Tadzio, who is as perfect and beautiful as Michelangelo’s David. The dye may not be dripping down my neck but it was evident to me that the fetishisation of young-looking hair was bullshit. Suddenly, going grey felt important. I went grey and everyone told me I was “brave” and some of my female friends were worried for me. All I felt was not just relief but freedom.

Going against this western tradition is a modestly radical act which is empowering in its own way. It is on a less magnificent note, also a gift. Going grey gave me back two months of life, assuming I spent four hours on average every four weeks with foil on my head, until, say, I was 80. Moronic magazines full of false gods while my eyes water from the chemical dyes. Going grey was letting go of something.

The Benin trip stayed with me over the years and took on a new shape in my memory and I started to understand it less as an observer to an exotic other and more as belief system full of magic and wonder. I did not romanticise it, but I saw how little of this existed in our own lives and that in its own way, magic is medicine for the soul and I needed it.

One night when we were in the middle of Benin I fell into a hideous depression caused by chloroquine, which is an antimalarial that has horrible side effects about a week after you’ve taken it. I felt so bad, I could understand why people kill themselves on it. The photographer came to my room and said “You have to come, there is a ceremony.” We walked down a narrow path and out into a clearing with dancing, drumming and a fire. It lifted me up almost physically, like a crutch.

At the summer solstice this year I went to Wasing, a small British stately home, on a mission to bring a more animist form of everyday spirituality to people. A hundred people gathered round an expertly tended fire, sat on straw bales. There was no alcohol for sale, only the mild stimulant cacao. Three siblings sang. I went with six other women my age. Some I liked, some not so much, but we were all rooted and earthed and sick of cynicism and wanted to walk in bare feet and spend the night among the trees until we walked up a hill to watch the sun rise on the shortest night and the longest day of the year.

It was magical. 

In voodoo, all of nature and life is infused with the supernatural and there’s a belief that post-menopausal women have supernatural powers. The older woman talk to ancestors and ask their help. 

I don’t know that I feel more connected to anything supernatural. I am not advocating we all become voodooists. But perhaps we can sit back from the position of our calm older power, and observe from our place of experience that the mad jabbering urge for stuff, or the weird filtered fake idea of beauty, or the champagne-spraying concept of wealth is a sort of curse. To live free of it is to. appreciate instead that there is magic out there and it will outlast all of us.