The Commonplace: Edition No.2

The women who told you about ageing left out the best parts. Not the physical things, though those arrive with their own particular surprises (Hello weird womb vibration?). The other things. The way your tolerance for nonsense quietly evaporates. The way you stop mid-sentence one day and think: I no longer believe this about myself. The way the performing falls away, not all at once but in pieces, like plaster from a wall that was always covering something more interesting underneath.

This week, The Commonplace turns its attention to that. To the woman who is still here, still arriving, still becoming. To ageing not as a series of losses to be managed but as a process of excavation. What remains when the performance stops is not less. It is, if you will allow yourself to look at it, considerably more.

One hundred things. Quotes worth keeping, films worth watching, books worth reading, recipes worth making, small practical tasks rooted in the belief that how you tend to yourself is a form of philosophy, and journal prompts for the questions only you can answer. Some of them will sit quietly. Some of them will not.

The first twenty-five are free, for everyone. The remaining seventy-five are for my paid subscribers, the women who have decided that a weekly act of gathering is worth the small cost of keeping it going. If you would like to come inside, you know where to find the door.

No. 2: On Ageing Without Shrinking

1. This weekend, go through your bathroom cabinet and throw away everything that promises to fix you. The creams that claim to erase. The serums that market themselves as corrections. Replace one of them with something that simply nourishes. A good oil. A thick cream that smells of something real. Stop punishing evidence of the woman you are becoming.

2. JOURNAL: Write the last time you made someone uncomfortable simply by taking up your full space. Write about whether you apologised.

3. WRITE IT DOWN: “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” (Mark Twain). Charming and insufficient. Mind it. Let it matter anyway.

4. The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi finds beauty in the imperfect, the impermanent, the incomplete. We qualify on all three counts. Act accordingly.

5. READ: The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. Published 1977. Still happening.

6. Getting older doesn’t have to spell humdrum. This week, take one item of clothing from your wardrobe that you have been saving for a special occasion and wear it on an ordinary day. Tuesday will do. The occasion is that you are alive and it fits and you chose it. That is enough.

7. LISTEN: I know I’m obsessed with her, but listen anyway: Patti Smith’s Because the Night. Because she was forty before most people had heard of her, and she has not stopped since.

8. WRITE IT DOWN: “Ageing is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.” (Betty Friedan). Write down three opportunities that only exist because of your age. Not despite it. Because of it.

9. In Japan, the art of kintsugi repairs broken pottery with gold, making the fracture lines the most beautiful part of the object. You know what this is a metaphor for. Let it be one.

10. Go to bed thirty minutes earlier than usual this week, just once, and don’t take your phone with you. Lie in the dark. Let your mind do what minds do when they are not being managed and try not to run from it. This isn’t wasted time. It’s the most useful thing you will do all day.

11. WATCH: Shirley Valentine (1989, Lewis Gilbert). A woman in her forties talks to her kitchen wall, then goes to Greece. It is funny and devastating and true and everyone should see it at least twice.

12. RECIPE: a simple bone broth, made on a Sunday from a leftover chicken carcass with onion, celery, carrot, a bay leaf, a splash of apple cider vinegar and cold water. Simmered for four hours, strained, kept in the fridge. Drink a cup of it warm on a weekday morning instead of a second coffee. Your joints will notice. Your skin will notice. You will notice.

13. WRITE IT DOWN: “The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world.” (Susan B. Anthony). She said this at seventy. Keep it.

14. Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex at forty-one. Toni Morrison published her first novel at thirty-nine. Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known as Grandma Moses, began painting at seventy-eight. The timeline is not the point.

15. LISTEN: Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love. For the knowledge that desire does not have an expiry date, whatever anyone implies.

16. This week, choose one room in your house and remove three things from it. Not to tidy. To breathe. Ageing well in your home means editing ruthlessly until only the things that genuinely sustain you, AND EXPLAIN YOU remain. The room will feel different.

17. JOURNAL: The version of myself I was most afraid I would become. Write her. Then write whether she has anything to teach me.

18. READ: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. A whole life, a woman’s whole life, taken seriously. The ordinariness of it made extraordinary by the simple act of looking…

19. The French phrase une femme d’un certain âge was always meant as a diminishment. Take it back and decide yourself what the “certain age” means.

20. RECIPE: miso soup made from scratch, not a packet, with good dashi, white miso, silken tofu and a handful of wakame. Eaten for breakfast, as it is eaten in Japan, where women have some of the longest healthy life expectancies in the world. It is ready in ten minutes. It is warm and savoury and deeply settling. Make it part of the week.

21. Watch: All About My Mother (1999, Pedro Almodóvar). Women of every age and configuration, living at full volume. None of them shrinking. STOP SHRINKING!

22. WRITE IT DOWN: “It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices.” (Albus Dumbledore, via J.K. Rowling). The choice not to diminish yourself is available every morning.

23. This weekend, take a walk with no destination and no distance in mind. Not for steps. Not for fitness. For the specific pleasure of moving through the world at your own pace with no one to keep up with and nowhere to arrive. Walk until you feel like turning back. Then walk a little further.

24. There is a difference between ageing and decaying. One is inevitable and interesting. The other requires your active participation. Do participate in your own life won’t you?

25. READ: Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp. About appetite, about filling emptiness, about the long work of becoming honest with yourself. For anyone who has ever used something to manage the feeling of being too much or not enough.

26. Colette published Chéri at forty-seven, The Last of Chéri at fifty-one, and Gigi at seventy-six. She was also, at various points, a music hall performer, a lover of younger men, and entirely herself. Decide now is the time to be more you.

27. WRITE IT DOWN: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” (Dylan Thomas). He wrote it for his dying father. It belongs equally to any woman who has ever been encouraged to be quieter, gentler, or less.

28. This week, find one piece of clothing you have kept out of guilt, sentiment or the vague hope that it will fit again, and let it go. Do not keep things in your wardrobe that make you feel bad about your body every time you open the door. Your wardrobe should only contain evidence of who you are, not who you were or who you thought you should be.

29. LISTEN: Aretha Franklin singing anything. But especially Respect, which she owned completely from the moment she recorded it. Respect is not given. It is announced. Declare it loud and clear.

30. JOURNAL: The things I know now that I wish I could send back to my younger self. Not warnings. Permissions.

31. READ: Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick. A daughter and her mother walking through New York, talking. About the inheritance of womanhood. About what we take from our mothers even when we are running from them.

32. WATCH: Muriel’s Wedding (1994, P.J. Hogan). Not for the wedding. For the transformation. For the moment a woman decides she is not who everyone said she was.

33. RECIPE: salmon with miso and ginger, baked in the oven for twelve minutes. Tablespoon of white miso, a teaspoon of honey, fresh ginger grated in, a little sesame oil. Spread it on the fish and leave it for twenty minutes before cooking. Serve with brown rice and wilted spinach. Eat it at the table, not at your desk. This is what looking after yourself actually looks like on a Wednesday night.

34. The body at fifty knows things the body at thirty was too busy performing to notice. Listen to it with the attention you gave to everyone else for all those years. If it takes lying flat on the floor wearing noise defenders to hear yourself think, then decide here and now to make it a ten minute daily ritual.

35. WRITE IT DOWN: “I am not afraid of ageing, but more broadly, of wasting my life.” (Simone de Beauvoir). Write down one thing you have been putting off that is not, if you are honest, actually waiting for anything.

36. This week, make your bedroom into the room it should be. Not a second office. Not a place where laundry lives. Clear the surfaces of everything that belongs somewhere else. Put something beautiful on the nightstand. Make the bed as though sleep matters, because it does, and because you deserve to walk into a room at night that feels like it is glad you are there.

37. In Oaxaca, elder women are called las sabias, the wise ones. Not the old ones. The wise ones. The distinction is the point. Own your wisdom from this day forward. Speak as if that wisdom could change lives.

38. NOTE: Your opinions are not too strong. The rooms were (always) too small.

39. READ: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. About grief, yes. But also about the strange labour of continuing to exist when the life you understood has changed shape entirely.

40. WATCH: Thelma and Louise (1991, Ridley Scott). Two women who choose freedom over safety and pay the full price for it. It is not a comfortable film. But nor is meant to be?

41. JOURNAL: prompt: The woman in my life who aged without shrinking. Describe her. What did she know? What did it cost her? What did she keep?

42. RECIPE: roasted beetroot and lentil salad with a tahini and lemon dressing and a handful of spinach. Make it on a Sunday and eat it for two lunches during the week. Cold, with good bread. It is earthy and sustaining and the colour of it alone is an argument for cooking from scratch.

43. A woman who still surprises herself is a woman who has not finished becoming. You have not finished becoming, surely?

44. WRITE IT DOWN: “The most important thing is to enjoy your life, to be happy. That is all that matters.” (Audrey Hepburn). She said this late. She meant it entirely. It took her a long time to believe it. You get to choose to believe it sooner because of her.

45. Start a five-minute morning practice this week. Not yoga, not meditation, not anything that requires equipment or instruction. Simply sit on the edge of your bed before you reach for your phone and ask yourself one question: what do I actually want today? Write the answer down or simply hold it. Do it every morning for a week and notice what shifts.

46. LISTEN: Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, the 2000 recording, not the 1969 version. Same song. Entirely different woman. The difference is what experience sounds like when it is allowed to show.

47. In Iceland, older women are among the most politically active in the country. They have stopped waiting to be asked. Stop waiting to be asked!

48. WRITE IT DOWN: “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.” (e.e. cummings). You have been fighting this longer than you know, haven’y you?

49. You are halfway through. Go and look in a mirror. Not to check anything. Just to look. Come back.

50. READ: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. Spare, precise, about a woman who comes from damage and builds something from it. About the strangeness of survival.

51. NOTE: The word invisible is often used about women over fifty as though it were simply a fact of nature. It is not. It is a choice made by the culture. You are not required to cooperate.

52. JOURNAL: What I would do if I were certain I would not be judged? Not by others. By myself.

53. This week, buy yourself one good thing for your house. that you have bee putting off because it felt indulgent. Inhabit the best version of your home and make it a priority now.

54. LISTEN: Nina Simone’s Ain’t Got No, I Got Life. A woman listing everything that has been taken from her and then listing everything that remains. It remains everything.

55. WATCH: The Wife (2017, Björn Runge). Glenn Close as a woman who has spent forty years making herself smaller to make a man larger. Watch it and feel whatever you need to feel.

56. RECIPE: turmeric golden milk, made on the stovetop before bed. Warm oat milk, a teaspoon of turmeric, half a teaspoon of cinnamon, a little honey, black pepper to activate the turmeric. Drink it in bed, in the dark, with nothing to read and nowhere to be. This is what anti-inflammatory looks like when it is also kind.

57. WRITE IT DOWN: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich). She wrote this as an observation in an academic paper in 1976. The world made it a bumper sticker. It remains true in both contexts.

58. Ageing is not something happening to you. It is something you are doing. Do it with the same intentionality you brought to everything else worth doing.

59. READ: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. Because being a feminist is not a purity test and never was. Because imperfection is the only honest position after menopause.

60. This week, move your body in one way that is not punishment and not performance. A slow swim. A walk in the rain. Dancing in the kitchen to a song you have loved for thirty years. Movement that asks nothing of your body except that it show up and be in the world for a little while.

61. LISTEN: PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. For the reminder that a woman’s voice does not need to be softened to be received. Some of us were never soft. Some of us need to CHOOSE to be heard now.

62. JOURNAL: The version of ageing I was sold by magazines, films, and my mother’s silence on the subject. Write it. Then write the version “I am choosing” instead.

63. The friendships of midlife are different from the friendships of youth. They have been tested. They have survived something. They know too much about you to require performance. These are the ones. Ring them today.

64. WRITE IT DOWN: “I am not young enough to know everything.” (Oscar Wilde). He meant it as a joke. Because al jokes are true.

65. RECIPE: slow-cooked white beans with rosemary and garlic, finished with good olive oil and eaten on toast or with roasted vegetables. Soak a tin of dried beans overnight, cook them for two hours with a whole head of garlic and a branch of rosemary, season generously. They are cheap and sustaining and ancient and they will make you feel, obscurely, as though you are doing something right.

66. This week, find one corner of your home that has become a holding place for things without a home of their own and deal with it. Not the whole house. One corner. The clarity it creates is ALWAYS disproportionate to the effort it requires.

67. NOTE: Your anger is not unattractive. It is information. Start treating it as such.

68. READ: When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön. About groundlessness, about the moment when everything you relied on disappears. About what remains when the scaffolding comes down.

69. WRITE IT DOWN: “I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists.” (John Steinbeck). You have been teaching people things about being a woman, being alive, being honest, for decades. You may not have known it was teaching. But it always was.

70. LISTEN: Carole King’s I Feel the Earth Move. Because joy is not something you age out of. And because a woman playing her own piano and meaning every note is one of the great sights and sounds available to us.

71. QUESTION: The grey hair question is not a question about hair. Answer the question you are actually being asked.

72. JOURNAL: The thing I have survived that I have never fully acknowledged surviving. Write it plainly. No softening. Then write: I survived this. I am still here. I am not the same and that is how it should be.

73. READ: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (again). A difficult woman in a small town, seen whole, across decades. She is not likeable in the way women are supposed to be likeable. She is real in the way very few fictional women are allowed to be.

74. This weekend, plan one thing to look forward to. Properly. Not a holiday, or a major event. Something small and near and entirely yours. A long bath on Saturday evening with a book and candles and the door locked. A solo cinema trip. Lunch somewhere you have never been, alone, with nothing to do afterwards. Make anticipation part of the most nurturing and vaidating of rituals.

75. WRITE IT DOWN: “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” (Carl Jung). You are not late. You are precisely on time for the becoming that required everything that came before it.

76. WATCH: Enchanted April (1991, Mike Newell). Four women in an Italian castle in April, slowly unfurling. A quiet film about what happens when women stop managing and start living. It will make you want to book something for change’s sake.

77. LISTEN: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. Because she made it at twenty-six and it sounds like a woman who already knew something the rest of us are still working out.

78. RECIPE: roast chicken with forty cloves of garlic, the classic French dish that sounds excessive and is in fact the most comforting thing you will eat this season. A whole chicken, forty unpeeled cloves of garlic scattered around it, olive oil, thyme, a glass of white wine in the bottom of the pan, two hours in a medium oven. The garlic becomes sweet and soft and spreadable on bread. The chicken falls apart. Eat it on a Sunday and feel both nourished and nurtured.

79. NOTE: The things you were told were flaws in your twenties are frequently the things that constitute your power in your fifties. Loudness. Directness. The refusal to be managed. The appetite for more. All yours now. Claim them.

80. JOURNAL: In a world that profits from your self-doubt, loving yourself is a rebellious act. List the ways you have been encouraged to doubt yourself this week alone. Then list what you know to be true instead.

81. READ: Educated by Tara Westover. About the long and costly process of choosing your own mind over the one you were given. And also about what it takes and what it costs and why it is still worth it.

82. WATCH: Morvern Callar (2002, Lynne Ramsay). A young woman in Scotland who makes a radical and morally complicated decision and then simply lives with it. Quiet and strange and unforgettable.

83. This week, sleep in clean sheets that you have washed with something that smells good and ironed or at least straightened before you get into them. This is not housekeeping. It is belief, enacted in linen, that you deserve to end the day well. You have earned that if nothing else.

84. JOURNAL: What would I stop doing tomorrow if I were not afraid of what it would mean about me?

85. LISTEN: Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler’s All the Roadrunning. For the pleasure of two people making something together with total ease. For the reminder that collaboration, real collaboration, is one of life’s great luxuries and we don’t have to be shy anymore about sharing our talents do we?

86. NOTE: The midlife woman who decides to stop performing does not become invisible. She becomes legible for the first time. Dwell on that for a while. What would it mean to you to be legible?

87. READ: The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown. Not because it will tell you anything you don’t already know. Because sometimes we need permission from a researcher to BELIEVE what we already know?

88. RECIPE: dark chocolate and almond bark, made by melting good dark chocolate, spreading it on a lined baking tray, scattering it with toasted almonds, a pinch of sea salt and dried rose petals if you have them, and leaving it to set in the fridge. Break it into pieces. Keep it in a tin and eat one piece a day as a considered pleasure rather than an anxious one. This is the difference.

89. WRITE IT DOWN:“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” Attributed to George Eliot, though the attribution is contested. True regardless. of who muttered it.

90. WATCH: Philomena (2013, Stephen Frears). Judi Dench as a woman in her eighties looking for the son who was taken from her. About the long patience of women.

91. This week, light a candle every evening at the same time. Not for ambience. As a ritual border between the doing part of the day and the being part of it. The candle is a signal to your nervous system that the performance is over and rest has begun. Honour that rest.

92. LISTEN: Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U. Not as a song about a man. As a song about grief and what a face looks like when it is telling the truth.

93. JOURNAL: The decade of my life I would return to if I could, and the decade I would not return to for anything. Write both. Write what each cost and what each gave.

94. The ambition does not have to leave you. It can change its shape. What do you want to build in the second half? Not what you should want. What you want? Take yourself to a park and walk the thought.

95. READ: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. A neurosurgeon dying of cancer writes about what makes a life meaningful. Not morbid. Clarifying, in the way that only honest reckoning with time can be.

96. RECIPE: whatever your grandmother made that you haven’t made in years. From memory if you can. From a phone call to someone who remembers if you can’t. From an approximation if that is all that is left. Make it. Eat it. Know that you are the continuity.

97. WRITE IT DOWN: “I am not resigned.” (Edna St. Vincent Millay). Said it in list one and it belongs here too. Some things need saying twice.

98. LISTEN: Etta James’ At Last. Not for the romance. For the voice. For the weight in it. For the thing that only arrives when a woman has lived long enough to mean every word.

99. NOTE: You are not running out of time. You are running out of tolerance for things that waste it. These are not the same thing. This weekend decide you a are no longer available for nonsense. Hold a boundary.

100. WRITE IT DOWN: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” (Anaïs Nin). That day may have been years ago. It may be today. Either way, blossoming is the point.

The Commonplace returns next Friday. One hundred more things, on a different theme. Bring something to write with.