I got there thirty years early

In June I imagined the life I'd look back on at 90. On Saturday I realised I was already living it.

Hello fellow traveller,

There's an exercise I do with almost every client.

I ask them to imagine they're 90 years old. Sitting somewhere beautiful, surrounded by the people they love and the people who love them. Looking back on a life that was rich, full, theirs. No sense of something missing. No unfinished business gnawing away. Just contentment. The deep kind. The kind that says: that was a life well lived, and I was there for all of it.

Then I ask them to describe it. And in describing it, they tell me, without realising, exactly what matters to them and exactly what they're not yet doing about it. It's one of the most revealing questions I know.

Some of you may remember I wrote about this exercise a few weeks ago, as something to try for yourself. What I didn't expect was to find myself on the other side of it quite so soon.

The garden

It was my 60th birthday gathering. My house, the garden full of the people I love, a warm evening near the end of summer. Belinda, my wife, stood up to speak.

Her speech was funny and warm and it moved through my whole life, the scrapes and the reinventions, and, underneath the laughter, the fact that I made it here at all. Because I lost my mother in a house fire when I was six. I lost my older brother in my early twenties. I came from a childhood that didn't obviously lead to a garden full of people I love on a warm night at 60. She spoke about the friends who aren't here to see it. And she spoke as if my being alive to hear any of it was itself the improbable, precious thing.

And somewhere in the middle of listening, it landed on me quietly.

This is it. This is the 90-year-old's garden. I'm sitting in it right now.

Thirty years early

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a man announcing he's finished. I'm not going anywhere. There's so much still to come, so many doors I haven't opened. But that particular feeling, the one I ask clients to reach for, the contentment of a life that feels complete, with nothing essential missing? I felt it. Fully. Thirty years before I'd told myself I might.

That is not how I felt at 53.

At 53 I was successful by every external measure and hollow underneath it. At 54 I walked away from the Conran Shop with no idea what came next, only three words I didn't yet understand: purpose, balance and joy. Back then, the 90-year-old's garden was a distant target. Something to orient towards. Something I hoped I'd feel one day, if I did the work and got lucky.

When I first did the exercise myself, the line that came through had nothing to do with titles or outcomes. It was about looking back grateful for a joyful and contented life, and leaving behind a happy, solid family I'd helped create and been a valued part of. I wrote it as an aspiration. A direction to walk in.

On Saturday, in the garden, I realised I was standing inside it.

Why it came so quickly

Here's the best answer I have.

Once I stopped chasing achievement and started orienting around those three words instead, everything sped up. Not the achieving, the arriving. I couldn't swim at 53, and the goal to swim in Greece opened a door that led to mountains and rivers and frozen lakes and a festival under an eclipse. Giving up alcohol. Dancing in public, which terrified me. Singing in public at 60, which I'd have told you was impossible, and which I'd done within a fortnight of deciding to try.

Each of these used to look outrageous from where I was standing. Each fell faster than the last. Not because I gripped harder, but because I let go. Because the orientation was right. When purpose, balance and joy are the compass, you stop white-knuckling your way towards a distant finish line and you start arriving, again and again, in the present.

The 90-year-old's contentment was never really a destination in the future. It was a way of being available now. And the moment I stopped postponing it, it stopped being thirty years away.

The question, then

So I'll leave you with the exercise itself, because it's yours to use too.

Picture yourself at 90, somewhere beautiful, surrounded by the people you love, looking back with no sense of lack. Hold it clearly.

Now the real question. Not how do you get there eventually.

What would it take to feel a little of that this year?

Best,
Hugh

You've lived many versions of yourself in this lifetime. And there are many more still to come.

If the 90-year-old's garden feels a long way off, and you'd like it to feel closer, that's the heart of the work I do. Let's have a conversation.

P.S. Belinda's speech was better than mine. I only had one thing I wanted to say, the thing I've just told you. She had a whole life's worth, and she delivered it while I sat there realising I'd quietly arrived somewhere I thought was decades away. Sixty years old, and still being taught something new by my wife.