Living and Aging at Two Scales
A small life by the sea and a mind that refuses to stay there
Our town used to be a sleepy seaside village. My great-uncle’s cottage in the centre still stands, taking me back to the 1960s when we used to visit him and my aunt. Now it is being dwarfed by apartment blocks. A whole new town is planned on the edge of the village, houses spreading across former paddocks while the same narrow roads strain under the pressure.
And yet, inside all this change, my life remains surprisingly small-scale.
We live on a quiet street, walking distance from the beach. A creek behind the house is perfect for early morning kayaking, gliding across glassy water while birds signal the start of the day.
Wide bike paths run for miles beyond the village. Locals greet each other with an easy “Good Morning,” though after ten years, we still don’t know many names. I suspect you need a dog to enter this inner circle.
Home life carries all the hallmarks of small-scale living—morning fitness, coffee on the deck, simple meals, family calls and visits.
Our favourite cafés see us coming, know our orders, and sometimes bypass the queue to deliver them personally.
What’s not to love about this idyllic life?
And yet, a small, persistent thought had begun to trouble me.
Why does it feel like I am settling into aging rather than fully living?
Big birthdays have a way of sharpening the question. Turning seventy made it real.
Even with an osteoporosis diagnosis shattering my ‘bulletproof’ demeanour soon after, I couldn’t imagine settling into a purely local life, however idyllic, for the decade ahead.
Maybe small-scale life has never been enough.
This is not a new feeling.
I grew up in a rural Australian town, hours from any regional or capital city. Even then, small didn’t cut it for me. I dreamed of bigger horizons—without knowing exactly what that meant.
I left for university, then for Sydney, and a career in banking. I tasted travel and wanted more. My husband and I worked on IT systems projects across Australia and overseas. The geography of our lives expanded.
Later, we retired early to acreage near where we now live. We grew organic produce, planted a rainforest, and hosted long family lunches on the verandah.
Small-scale at its best.
And yet, the itch for something larger never quite disappeared.
An opportunity to build an Amazon products business appeared out of nowhere. Off we went again—creating a US company, expanding into the UK and Europe, travelling extensively.
With a daughter living in London, I discovered something new: the possibility of living small-scale inside a big-scale life. We returned to the same Airbnb in a village on the outskirts of London, close to family and countryside. We became National Trust members and lived like locals, in small, repeated rhythms. For a time, I had both.
Returning home in January 2020, just as COVID closed the world down, we were forced back into a small-scale life. Now, global instability is doing something similar.
And still, the itch remains.
So I had to pull this apart.
Because as I face my seventies, the question has not gone away. And here is what I have come to see. Travel is not the only way to live large.
A pivot was required.
Small-scale living offers a rich life in its own right—but it can also serve as the foundation for something larger. These days, I am building a rooted daily life in service of an expanded intellectual one.
My office, in my home by the sea on Australia’s east coast, is where small-scale village life and big-scale thinking now meet. I may not have Virginia Woolf’s view across the South Downs, or Kipling’s dark oak study lined with jewel-coloured books. But like them, my office has become both observatory and monastery.
Travel may no longer be my primary vehicle for expansion.
Ideas are.
As travel has slowed, ideas have taken over the work of expansion.
The writers I now keep company with did not live jet-set lives. They lived anchored lives with expansive minds.
So perhaps my problem was never about aging.
It was about understanding scale.
Life can operate on two levels at once.
My eighth decade may not be one of doing more.
But it may be a decade of seeing more clearly.
A life where the world comes to me through ideas, while I remain rooted in place.
Love this. x