It’s my birthday this week.
It was also my dad’s birthday a few days ago, and my sister-in-law and my brother-in-law. This week is also my brother’s birthday. Then at the end of the month it’s the birthday of a good friend, and of another good friend’s child. All I can assume is that a lot of couples were getting down to it on Valentine’s Day.
To celebrate all these birthdays, this post contains:
A special offer to get free access to paywalled posts AND a discount on paid subscriptions
Reflections on getting older
Creative sparks for this week
Normally these Seasonal Sparks posts are for paid subscribers only, but I’m offering this one to everyone in celebration.
Older and wiser
So November should be a month of joyous celebration, and, don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of fun and love during this month. But it’s also a little hectic. There’s a lot of pressure, to remember to send all the cards at the right time, to get all the presents, to sort out when we can see everyone. And all of this when we’re gearing up for the festive season and planning all the same things for everyone we know. It’s a time of year that feels intense, at a time when nature is asking us to slow down.
It’s also a particularly intense time for me, because this birthday sees me turning 40. I’m not upset about getting older - I remember agonising over turning 30 and being really quite distressed about moving into a new decade. But my 30s turned out to be the best time of my life so far. I’m equally optimistic about my 40s. Each new decade - which my friends and I now refer to as “levelling up” - seems to bring a greater level of confidence, of self-knowledge, of alignment and purpose. Every year that I get older, I also find I shed more of the f*cks I used to give - about what people think, about what society says I should do with my life or what I should care about, and about negative energy I encounter. Those things used to eat me up inside, but, more and more, I’m finding that I’m living consciously within my values and my sense of purpose and everything else just slides away. Well, it’s not quite that simple, but I’m getting there. Hopefully, by 50, I’ll have nailed it.
I can’t say that I’m totally relaxed about entering a new decade, though. There’s still all the internalised negativity about ageing that our society has fed me from birth that I’m working hard to unpick. And, even when I lean into the idea that age brings wisdom and power, and that society demonised older women because they feared them (a sure sign that getting older is actually full of good stuff), I still can’t escape the knowledge that getting older does bring me closer to the end of my life. Sure, I hope I’ve got at least another 40 years in me, but is 40 years as a person getting older enough time to do everything I want to do? The archetype in my brain of a person in their 60s, 70s, 80s is of someone elderly and frail, and that’s still largely the image we’re fed by the media. But when I think about the people in my life who are those ages, that’s not what I see at all. Two of my friends are about to turn 50, and I don’t feel that they’re much different to me. My dad has just turned 80 and, sure, he looks older, but he doesn’t seem frail, he doesn’t seem elderly. Maybe he moves a little slower than he used to, he’s given up playing rugby (although that didn’t happen until maybe 10 years ago), but he certainly doesn’t look to me like someone who can’t do things, whose life is restricted. Then I look at Margaret Atwood, my absolute idol, who is 83. Sure, she’s getting older, she just had a pacemaker installed, but she also did a tap dance to celebrate. I saw her giving a talk a couple of years ago, and she was so full of life and energy and drive - not at all the archetype of a woman in her 80s, but something for me to aspire to.
I’ve learned to accept that, getting older doesn’t have to mean you have accomplished everything, but it does mean that you’re clear on what it is that you want to accomplish. All those life experiences you have under your belt just provide greater fuel and material for you to use to accomplish those goals. For me, if I hadn’t been busy living in my 20s and 30s, I wouldn’t have much to write about in my 40s. But now I can write from the heart. I’ve also learned that the ageing process is an opportunity to curate your life more carefully - to get clear on who and what you really want around you, and to let go of the rest. And I’ve learned that growing older is a gift - not everyone gets to do it, and each day that we get to have the experience of this life is a chance for adventure.
What have you learned about getting older?
I’m also still trying to honour that element of slowing and turning inward that this season asks of us. The darkness increases our production of melatonin, the hormone that tells us to sleep. The cold makes us want to curl up and spend time at home. Maybe neither of those things are possible right now, but I can still be intentional about how I celebrate this time. I can create cosy gatherings to mark the birthdays. I can find time to pause and reflect on my own sense of growing older, and on the experiences I share with friends and family, along the way. I can take my time to make gifts with love, instead of rushing around like a manic hamster in a wheel of consumerism. And speaking of making gifts, I made one for you…
My gift to you
To celebrate my birthday, I’m temporarily removing the paywall on a wide selection of my paid posts, so, if you’re a free subscriber, you can have a look around at what else is on offer.
Then, if you decide you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription so you can get more posts like these going forward, during the month of November you can get 50% off a paid subscription. £4 per month instead of £8, or £40 for a whole year.
Creative sparks
Ageing and progression is in the air in November - the shedding and release of nature might seem like a process of decay, but those fallen leaves are being used as nourishment for the soil so that something new can grow. In this week’s creative sparks, we’ll look at what you’ve released and what that can be used to create.
Journal prompt: life lessons
How have you changed in the last 10 years? 20 years? What lessons have you learned? How can you apply those to the next 10/20/30 years? What have you let go of? How has that served you? What would you like to let go of now to make room for more in the future?
Exploration: reaching through time
Create a message to your 16-year-old self. This could be a letter, or it could be a painting or photographs or any other medium you choose to communicate what you think your younger self needed to know.
Then create a message (again, in any form) to your current self from yourself at 80. What would your older self want to reach back and tell you now? What insights and learnings do they have to share with you? What do they want to tell you about what your future holds?
Creative spark: celebration
Use this prompt as inspiration for your creative practice using whatever medium calls to you this week.
If you have a current project on the go, you could look at how celebration, or the act of celebrating / honouring, plays a role in your narrative or your message, or what it means for the subject of your work.
Or you could use it as a prompt to create something entirely new.
Whatever you create, I’d love to see it! Please do feel free to share your responses to these prompts with me in the comments.
Happy Birthday Allegra! It was my birthday yesterday. 56 and still here! Not bad considering my parents were told I’d be lucky to survive to 5! Oh the wonder of life!
Happy birthday Allegra! I loved reading this and as I approach 40 in the next couple of years a lot of your thoughts about ageing resonated. I too, feel mainly positive about it though it is also quite baffling to me, am I not still 21?! Anyway, my main hope is that I feel comfortable and ready rather than resistant to the new chapter/decade when it comes.
I loved the prompts and look forward to delving into them xx