Angela Mollard: Start changing your life by doing nothing
Columnist Angela Mollard was secretly working towards living to 100, seeking wisdom from people like Queen Elizabeth, but decided there’s other ways to enjoy life while still living.
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A few years ago I started to harbour a secret goal.
I decided I wanted to live to 100 and would quietly do anything I could to achieve it.
I wasn’t going to emulate those centenarian freaks who summit Everest or lie about in ice baths but I was prepared to make some genuine effort – even concessions – to increase my likelihood of longevity.
I vowed to move more, think more positively, stay adventurous, lift weights, play sudoku, do more yoga and remain curious rather than give in to the increasingly common malaise of judgment.
I even started seeking wisdom from really old people like the English bloke who trundled round his garden to raise money at the beginning of the pandemic.
And Eddie Jaku, the Happiest Man On Earth, who died in October aged 101 and saw every breath as a gift.
While life wasn’t easy, he said, “it is easier if you love it”.
Even the Queen inspired me. Acceptance, she has said, is the word she lives by which must be some help when your adored son is an alleged sex pest and your grandson won’t stop “speaking his truth”.
Ah yes, I thought, I could cultivate “acceptance” if it meant I could rack up another half century.
But then I read a really good book. The best I’ve read in years actually.
It’s called Four Thousand Weeks and it’s written by Oliver Burkeman, a psychologist I’ve long admired. He gets straight to the point.
“The average human lifespan,” he begins his treatise, “is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.”
As I inhaled Burkeman’s insightful and warmly delivered advice I found myself underlining not threads of wisdom but great life-changing handfuls of the stuff.
For instance, the average person only gets 4000 Saturday nights. We will always have too much to do and the day will never arrive when everything is done. You will never be a fully optimised person who can finally turn to things that life is really supposed to be about.
There’s more.
So many of us are “pathologically productive” and incapable of rest. Plenty are absent in the present. Others set goals for our leisure activities as if the purpose is to get them “done” rather than to enjoy them for their own sake.
Like me, Burkeman is a huge fan of Rod Stewart, but not because he adores the opening bars of Maggie May but because he applauds the rocker’s enthusiasm for building model railways.
More of us, he says, should cultivate hobbies that are immersive, not self-improving or contrived to improve our brands.
Reading Burkeman is like refurnishing the inside of your own head but there is one phrase that has prompted me to reappraise – and act – more than any other. As he points out, while we might think we have an endless supply of tomorrows, the truth is anything can happen in the next half-hour.
We know this.
It happened in Tasmania when a freak wind gust killed children on a bouncy castle. It happened in Brisbane when four died when their plane crashed into the ocean. It happened up the road from me when a freak storm last week toppled a tree which killed a yoga teacher.
Doubtless all of them would’ve loved to have lived to 100. How misplaced of me to think that I might.
Burkeman, Covid and yet another delay in seeing my parents in New Zealand has prompted me to have a radical rethink. I’ve abandoned my longing to live to 100 along with all the work and finetuning and future-focus that entails.
Of course, I’ll try to stay healthy and I’ll never forego curiosity or the notion that attitude determines most things, but it’s time to stop living by a “to-do” list. Crucially, I can no longer sacrifice a single day to an imagined future.
Having spent five decades being effortful, I want to be effort-less. I’ll take the Coles profiteroles for dessert rather than labouring in the kitchen if it buys me an extra hour of rest.
Apparently, it’s called “strategic underachievement” – the practice of nominating whole areas of life where you don’t expect excellence from yourself.
Likewise, I’ll try to let life unfold rather than always attempting to corral it into a sequence of novel or ideal experiences. New is good but so is old and soft and lived in.
I like having opinions but I’d also like to have a bigger heart. As Burkeman says, just as we have a finite life we have a finite capacity to care so it must be consolidated.
I’ll also follow his advice and occasionally scribble a “done” list, not because it’s proof of endeavour but because it may quell the assumption so many of us have that we start our days with a “productivity debt”.
Finally, after 21 years of raising two children to adulthood I will start this Boxing Day by doing nothing. Well, except breathing.
Like so many, I’m unfamiliar with the ease of doing nothing. It seems like an ideal way to use a little of whatever portion of my four thousand weeks I have left.
ANGELA LOVES...
NATIVE VIOLETS
I planted these little cuties between the railway sleepers on my driveway and I love how they grow so tenaciously, whatever the weather.
CLAUDIA KARVAN
My kids say her roles in Puberty Blues and Bump playing a controlling teacher and mother remind them of me (little buggers). But gosh she’s a great actress. We’re so lucky to have her.
MODERN FAMILIES
This time of year highlights how many have non-conventional families. If you’ve had to show grace or navigate a tricky situation I salute you. Well done.
We need a reality TV show about real relationships
So Carrie and Big don’t end up together.
Even if they knock out another 10 Sex And The City remakes and have Sarah Jessica Parker and her mates whooping it up in an aged-care facility over tea and scones there will be no happy ever after for television’s most compelling yet dysfunctional couple.
After three decades in our consciousness, a couple of appalling movies, the wildly misplaced elevation of cosmopolitans as a desirable cocktail and a shoe fixation which has left women the world over with limp superannuation balances, the Sex And The City franchise has finally delivered some wise life advice.
And that is, however much we are invested in them, relationships don’t always work out.
Carrie and Big. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. Ben Affleck and JLo. Whether they’re real or fictional we’re obsessed with having these grand love affairs endure.
It’s as if we never grew up from the mindless Disney princess narrative and believe that because of their attractiveness or their allure or simply their place in our collective imagination, these couples are somehow immune from the ordinary travails of love.
Whether it’s the internet willing Brad and Jen back together or the rebooted Bennifer gazing at each other as if they’ve unearthed some magic love potion unavailable to us mortals, or the collective grief Carrie and Big will never be (spoiler alert: he carks it) it’s time we dispensed with confected love stories and broadcast some real ones.
After 708 seasons of The Bachelor, every dastardly act imaginable on Married At First Sight and the ludicrous heels + bikini = romance construct on Love Island Australia, I’d like to see a television show with some real couples facing real challenges and learning how to work them out.
If the ratings for Channel 9’s Parental Guidance is anything to go by, viewers are craving insights into how to improve their relationships which is understandable since they’re the greatest factor in our happiness.
It’s time we moved away from the cartoon love exhibited on our “reality” dating shows which, as I’ve said before, are simply soft porn with ad breaks.
Likewise, we need to stop projecting on to celebrities who entwine “love” with self-promotion. When Jennifer Lopez marked her birthday in July by confirming her relationship with Affleck with a highly stylised picture on Instagram dozens of (smart) people I know actually “liked” the image.
Good luck to them, they look like they’re having fun but I’m not buying it. Affleck is a terrific actor but also a stunted man child who this week revealed his drinking problem was caused because he felt “trapped” in his marriage to Jennifer Garner. How delightful that his children – the eldest is 16 – get to hear that.
Rather, just as the brilliant Parental Guidance gave viewers excellent parenting advice, I’d like to see a show called Relationship Guidance give couples strategies and communication skills for dealing with the conundrums we all face.
It’s bizarre program makers haven’t commissioned such a show considering podcasts such as Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin is going gangbusters and Instagram accounts such as Mark Groves’ @createthelove and psychologist Nicole Lepera’s @the.holistic.psychologist are attracting millions of followers.
Television is our most universal medium yet it’s so lacking in real love stories. Where are the tales of enduring, imperfect, nourishing, complicated and ordinary love? Why after two years of a pandemic which has thrown a light on to our relationships like never before, are we not being offered content which teaches us how to be better partners?
Just as there is no longer a stigma around discussing mental health, it’s obvious we’re more willing than ever before to talk about our relationships. Not because we’re prurient or nosy or want to benchmark ourselves against others but because there’s a universal desire to be better at something that means so much.
In a pub in a coastal town last week I got talking to a couple of blokes in their early 50s and within minutes they were open about their marriages. One, a former AFL player, admitted he had anger issues and it was his fault his relationship had been rocky. His determination to better understand himself was heartfelt.
So I asked him if he was guilty of “kitchen sinking”, a form of defensiveness which Perel recently outlined. It’s a pattern couples fall into when they argue where every past grievance is piled one on top of the other like a stack of dirty dishes. As she points out, when you pile up past issues rather than dealing with the one issue which has been specifically raised, you won’t solve a thing.
If Parental Guidance can galvanise an audience with such prosaic issues as discipline and smacking, then a show on relationships would be a timely guide to love challenged by infidelity, lack of intimacy, job loss, poor communication and the unresolved issues of a painful childhood. Carrie and Big could even be a case study: can a chronic over spender and a narcissist ever happily coexist?
Clearly it’s a bit late for them but it’ll surely help someone.
ANGELA LOVES...
JULIE’S SALAD
My friend Julie recently elevated greens into a delicious and nourishing salad. Basically,
blanch broccoli, beans and asparagus then dress them with chopped mint, currants soaked
in sherry vinegar, roasted hazelnuts, lemon, oil and salt and pepper. Add feta if you like.
I’m a Rod Stewart fan of old and his Instagram is a lovely mix of family, singalongs,
throwback pictures and pride in a life well lived.
BODY WASH
If you want a cute present for a girl Sundae Body’s shower foams in retro packaging and
with scents such as pomegranate fizz, coconut cream, orange crush and cherry on top are
just the ticket.
Why I’m OK being a dreadful Christmas gift giver
I hate to boast but I am all over Christmas decorations this year.
The tree is up and festooned with 18kg of baubles and the ornaments the kids made at kindy – a pasta Jesus and a reindeer fashioned out of a toilet roll – are in pride of place. Even the fairy, typically recalcitrant when it comes to standing upright even though it’s her only task for the year, is uncharacteristically obedient at the top of this exemplary confection.
Outside dainty lights are threaded across the balustrades where their manic epilepsy-inducing flashing has been toned down to a gentle glow, and a fake fir wreath from Coles – a steal at $20 – is harmonising nicely with the sage green front door.
Inside festive-scented candles vie for olfactory dominance with gardenias from my garden and strands of felt angels are pinned above the windows. The advent calendar, which is as much a fixture of my children’s childhoods as my nagging about manners, is groaning with chocolates, riddles and little notes encouraging the girls to bake for a friend who is unwell.
If this wasn’t sufficient scene setting, I’ve already road-tested a recipe for gin and beetroot cured ocean trout and checked I have the ingredients for the made-from-scratch lamington wreath dessert which was such a hit last year.
I know, I know, my preparedness is nauseating but it’s due to two factors: a need for joy and delight after the emotional, social and financial pummelling delivered by the pandemic; and a need to excel at something to offset my woeful present game.
The fact is I’m dreadful at gifts. This year even more so.
You see I have so comprehensively excelled at the other four languages of love that I’ve got nothing left for gifting. My commitment to acts of service, quality time, words of affirmation and affection – four of the five languages which apparently denote loving behaviour – have been so exhaustively delivered this year that bestowing gifts of any thought or significance is beyond my capabilities.
This is unfortunate because I have two offspring who rather like a bit of gift-wrapping and something lovely within. Me? I’d be happy if someone else unstacked the dishwasher on Christmas Day or gave me a shoulder massage.
But how do you convey that you’re hoarse with love languaging? How do you explain that all those times you sat listening to a Year 12 drama monologue during lockdown was, in fact, a gift commensurate with anything you could get from Sephora?
Or that the endless supply of fajitas, homemade chilli and cupcakes with chocolate icing were such a meaningful and soldering act of service that new sneakers pale in comparison? Or that customised facials, delivered on multiple Saturday evenings in lieu of the recipient attending 18th birthday parties, were the gold-standard of affection and could be credited towards Yuletide gifting as far forward as 2030.
Indeed, having created a whole new love language – namely, choosing to ignore any less than ideal behaviour from a stressed and locked down teen – I should be excused from presents until she has sprogs of her own.
Sadly, neither she nor her older sister, trapped in Canberra and denied any love languages except words of affirmation conveyed down the phone line, are having none of it. As they point out, I’ve been an uninspired gift buyer for years now and it’s time I showed more enthusiasm.
They have a point. Having decided last year that Christmas stockings, a tradition from their dad’s English side of the family, should cease once they turn 18, I ran out of steam as the youngest woke up for the last time to find a snowman stocking at the end of her bed. “Really?” she inquired upon unpacking its contents. “Santa schleps halfway round the world to deliver me pasta sauce?”
That was before she found the jar of stewed apples. “Well, you do love roast pork,” I reasoned. “How cool that Santa knows you so well.”
It’s no surprise the pair of them have made a pre-emptive strike, reminding me of multiple years they received dud presents. One year it was school socks because, well, they were needed. Another it was a toy lamb that sang nursery rhymes very slowly as a means to getting toddlers to sleep. It was sent to me by a PR and rather than review it then give it away, I re-gifted it to my daughter.
“Yes, Mum, but it was for a toddler and I was 13,” she said archly.
“Yes, but you were having trouble sleeping,” I pointed out.
The elder daughter remains sceptical about receiving a blow torch – “for making creme brulee,” I explained excitedly. She’s used it once but I’m thinking it could be repurposed as a heat source in Canberra.
The fact is, gifting can be perilous. It’s more than 18 years since Alan Rickman broke Emma Thompson’s heart by buying that necklace for the office tart in Love Actually but it still makes my eyes smart.
Much as it may pain my loved ones, surely gifts belong to the environmentally unfriendly pre-pandemic era.
Now we can hug each other again, surely that – and time together – is enough?
ANGELA LOVES...
COASTAL TOWNS
I’ve been camping this week and loving the good-natured service everywhere from cafes and bowlos. If you’re travelling this Christmas, expect the welcoming to be heartfelt.
WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY
Google the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards and vote for the People’s Choice award which features images of jumping squirrels, an orang-utan taking care of its young and cuddling monkeys.
ESTHER PEREL
As we enter the “divorce season” I suggest following the renowned relationship expert on Instagram for her brilliant reminders that the quality of our relationships determine the quality of our lives.
True value of being friends with neighbours
When I was looking to buy a house, I knew it would be the right one if it had a frangipani tree.
And so it did.
Trouble was my frangipani wasn’t a dainty thing but a monster which took up most of the front garden and dwarfed the little fibro shack I planned to demolish. Indeed, when the draughtsperson sent through the plans for my new house, there was a cross through the tree with one word: REMOVE.
My frangipani was my good luck charm. I couldn’t kill it and I certainly wasn’t giving it away. Instead I persuaded a landscaper to cut it in half and haul the two pieces into the back yard where I tied yellow ribbons to the hacked trunks and asked the demolition lads to spare them from the bulldozer.
“If you’re lucky one will survive,” said the landscaper.
“I’m so glad you’re trying to keep it,” said my neighbour, Judy, who had introduced herself a couple of weeks after I moved in.
That was January 2020, just a week after I last visited my mum in New Zealand.
Her name is also Judy and what I didn’t know then was that over the next two years as the pandemic prevented us all from seeing our loved ones, my neighbour Judy would become a surrogate for my mum.
In an era where neighbours have become a nemesis and plenty turn to social media rather than over the fence to bolster their friendship group, Judy has reminded me how much we gain from having good people, literally, by our sides.
That she seems more content and calmer than many of my contemporaries, makes me wonder why we don’t all see the value in having older friends.
Mostly we talk about plants. She loves them and so do I. She babysat my fiddle-leaf fig during my house build and gave me a pot of chives when we moved in. This week she alerted me to the annual change to a large tree in her garden which affords a magnificent view from my dining room.
“The caterpillars are on the march,” she texted. “Soon the leaves will be gone.”
Facebook and Instagram have taught us to measure our connections with followers and likes but there is no metric for these quotidian exchanges with neighbours.
The precious interactions are incidental rather than solicited yet I suspect they both infuse and steady us more than we know.
I must’ve mentioned to Judy how much my younger daughter loves lavender because last month there were two pots – a petunia and a lavender — on our doorstep with a note of encouragement as she started her Year 12 exams.
“I chose this one when I read ‘thrives on neglect’,” she wrote on lilac notepaper printed with butterflies.
My girl was touched. She took my phone: “Hi Judy, it’s Lilibelle,” she typed. “Lavender is my favourite flower because it’s so calming. Thank you for your thoughtful words.”
I’m glad my daughters see that the world turns on these tiny kindnesses. I keep receiving emails from PR companies alerting me to “stocking fillers” for the festive season and I wish we could stuff the bloody stocking fillers and do something nice for our neighbours instead.
I don’t know much about Judy’s personal life because I don’t like to pry but she walks. A lot. There are grandchildren but, like me and my mum, I’m not sure how much she’s been able to see them through the pandemic.
She knows I support the All Blacks and sent a message when they won for the 19th time in a row. I tell her I like the commentator Alana Ferguson. So knowledgeable. Judy likes her too.
When Jacinda Ardern slammed the NZ border shut four days before I was due to fly over in June I suspect Judy heard my tears. My mum had lost her brother to cancer two weeks before. Judy said, “I’m so sorry” and “your mum must be very disappointed” and it was somehow different to how others commiserate. More knowing. More felt.
Sometimes I stop and chat just to hear her voice. I’m particularly partial to lovely voices and Judy’s is both proper and playful which is a rare combination. Talking with her reminds me of interviewing Judi Dench.
Chatting to Judy this week, I thought about the Queen and her dresser, Angela Kelly. They’re neighbours or, rather, castle mates of sorts. There’s 31 years between them but they’re great friends.
Having had another annus horribilis, what with Covid and losing Philip and Prince Andrew’s sex pest allegations and Harry and Meghan going rogue, it’s comforting to know the Queen has someone in her corner when she’s not particularly well.
Last weekend as I surveyed the ailing transplanted frangipani in my front garden, Judy walked past and noted my disappointment. We agreed its only chance of survival was a severe prune.
“But come and see the other one,” I urged, leading her through the house to the back garden.
As she gazed at the huge sculptural spectacle of glossy leaves and budding flowers, it was hard to know which one of us is more thrilled.
ANGELA LOVES…
JAGGED LITTLE PILL
If you love an Alanis Morissette anthem, run don’t walk to see Natalie Bassingthwaighte in the show at Sydney’s Theatre Royal. Moves to Melbourne in the New Year.
CHAMPAGNE
Go for your life if you can afford French but for something easier on the purse, I love Cloudy Bay Pelorus which you can pick up for around $30.
SELF-TAN
Because I’m a religious sunscreen wearer I sometimes want a little more colour in my face. A few drops of Bondi Sands Pure Self-Tanning Drops mixed with my moisturiser does the trick.
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