I Had to Live First

For a long time, I think I misunderstood what it meant to be running out of time.

There is a particular kind of arithmetic that begins somewhere in midlife. You become aware of years in a way you were not at thirty. You start calculating backwards and forwards without meaning to. How long have I already been doing this? How many useful years might still be ahead? If I were really going to become good at something, shouldn’t I have done it by now?

Writing is particularly susceptible to this kind of thinking.

There are writers who publish extraordinary books when they are very young, and because their stories are unusual, we hear about them. The twenty-something novelist. The brilliant debut. The person who somehow seemed to understand exactly what they were meant to do before the rest of us had even worked out what to make for dinner.

It is difficult not to absorb the suggestion that talent has a timetable.

Then recently I came across something that changed the way I thought about it. I discovered that many writers do some of their greatest work in their fifties, sixties and beyond. There are exceptions, of course. There always are. But something about the idea lodged itself quietly inside me.

Perhaps I am not late.

Perhaps I am still becoming good.

There was an unexpected relief in that thought. Not the comforting sort of reassurance that tells you everything will work out simply because you want it to. I have never found that particularly useful. It was something more practical than that. It made sense.

Because when I think about writing now, I realise I have things to write with that I simply did not possess when I was younger. Not vocabulary or technique. Life.

I know what it feels like to love people for decades rather than years. I know the strange combination of tenderness and exasperation that exists inside family life. I know what it is to watch children grow taller than you, to feel proud of their independence and slightly wounded by it at the same time.

I know that home can be a kitchen in the suburbs and also a table somewhere beside the Ocean. I know that you can spend years building a life and still find yourself wondering about another one.

I know the smell of garlic hitting warm olive oil in a dozen borrowed kitchens. I know how a tomato eaten somewhere hot can remain in your memory long after you have forgotten the name of the restaurant. I know the pleasure of sitting at a table with people you love when nobody is in a hurry to leave.

I could not have written about these things at twenty-five because I did not know them yet. I might have understood them intellectually. But I had not lived inside them.

And perhaps that is one of the gifts of getting older that we do not talk about enough. We accumulate all this brilliant material. Not just experiences, but interpretations of them that can only come with time.

At twenty, something happens. At fifty, you understand that the interesting part may be what it meant.

This idea has made me feel differently about writing. I no longer feel quite so much pressure to prove that I should already have arrived somewhere. Perhaps there is no arrival. Perhaps there is only the gradual sharpening of attention.

Reading more.

Writing more.

Travelling.

Cooking.

Watching.

Listening.

Mostly I just like the possibility that the books I most want to write might still be ahead of me. Not despite my age. Because of it.

Perhaps the sentences will become better because I will understand silence better.

Perhaps the characters will become more complicated because I have stopped believing people are easily explained.

Perhaps the places will feel more alive because I have learned to notice the small things: laundry moving above a Lisbon street, the smell of coffee drifting from a doorway, a bowl of figs on a kitchen bench, the particular blue of the Atlantic in late afternoon.

These things once seemed like background. Now I think they may be the story.

And once I allowed myself to believe that my best writing might still be ahead, another thought followed. What else might I become good at later?

The question feels almost rebellious.

We are encouraged to think of ability as something discovered early. The gifted musician. The natural athlete. The born writer. The person who found their calling and followed it obediently from childhood onward.

But lives rarely unfold so neatly.

What if there are things we are not yet ready to be good at?

Perhaps there is a kind of work that requires forty years of observation before you can do it properly. Perhaps there is a business you could only imagine after you have worked out what you value.Perhaps there is a place you could only create once you understand what makes people feel welcome.

Perhaps there are friendships you become better at maintaining. Meals you become better at serving. Stories you become better at telling. Perhaps wisdom itself is a craft.

There are things I am undeniably worse at now than I once was. I cannot pretend otherwise. My body occasionally reminds me that youth was useful. My feet ache more quickly after walking up a steep Lisbon street. My eyesight has begun negotiating the distance between a menu and my face.

But other things are becoming clearer.

I know what I like.

I know what I do not want to waste my time pretending to like.

I understand that a beautiful life does not necessarily require grandeur. It may require good bread. A table near a window. People you can talk to for hours. Work that absorbs you. Somewhere you want to return to. And enough curiosity to keep imagining what might come next.

That last part feels important. Curiosity. Because perhaps ageing begins to feel frightening only when we imagine the future becoming progressively more limiting. But what if that is not the whole story? What if some possibilities are only beginning to become available? There is something almost delicious about discovering this at midlife.

The thought that somewhere ahead there may be a book I have not yet imagined. A table I have not yet sat at. A coastline I have not yet walked. A person I have not yet met. A skill I have barely begun to understand. A version of myself I have not yet had the years to become.

I find myself thinking about the writers whose finest work came later and wondering whether they knew. Did they sit at their desks at forty-eight or fifty-three or sixty-one thinking they should have done more by then? Did they worry that they had missed their moment? Or did they simply keep working?

Perhaps that is the part worth remembering. They kept going. They remained interested. They continued to notice.

And eventually all those years...the disappointments, journeys, marriages, meals, mistakes, books, houses, conversations, losses, ordinary Tuesday afternoons...found somewhere to go.

Onto the page.

I love that thought. It turns ageing from a process of subtraction into one of accumulation.

Another place.

Another flavour.

Another person loved.

Another thing understood differently than before.

Another story.

I don't know whether I will ever write something that could be called great. Greatness is an awkward thing to aim for anyway. But I like knowing that the possibility has not expired.

More importantly, I like the feeling the idea has given me: that there may still be work ahead of me capable of surprising even me. That I might one day look at something I have written and think "I could not have written this any earlier." I had to live first.

And perhaps this applies to far more than writing. Perhaps there are things each of us can only become after enough years have passed.

Not because we finally discover who we are. But because we have spent long enough paying attention. I have been myself my whole life. What interests me now is who that self might still become.

And for the first time in a while, the years ahead do not feel like a diminishing number.

They feel like opportunity, adventure, and of course...material.