Hey there Reader,
Literature has always felt a little like anthropology to me.
Both ask us to look closely at other people’s lives and in doing so recognise something of ourselves.
A character may be much older than us, living in a completely different place or facing circumstances we’ve never experienced. But in their disappointments, hopes, habits, and moments of insight, we find evidence of our common humanity.
Sometimes it takes only a few lines.
In Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune, Ron is watching some of the residents swimming at his retirement village:
“He can see a woman in her eighties doing slow lengths in the pool, and a man in his nineties doing slow widths. Do what you can while you can. Their inevitable collision, when it happens, is very friendly, even flirtatious … Again, do what you can while you can.”
Do what you can while you can.
Read one way, it sounds like a warning.
Take the trip. Run the marathon. Work your way through the bucket list before time or circumstance takes the opportunity away.
But that’s not really what’s happening in the pool.
Neither swimmer is doing anything major. The woman is completing slow lengths. The man, who presumably can’t manage the full length of the pool, is doing slow widths instead.
They’re not pretending age hasn’t changed what they can do.
They’ve changed the scale.
In design, scale is about the relationship between something and the space it occupies.
A piece of furniture might be beautiful, but if it’s too large for the room, it can overwhelm everything around it. Something too small can disappear entirely. The object itself isn’t necessarily wrong, it just doesn’t fit its surroundings.
The same can be true of the things we do.
An activity that once fitted comfortably into our lives can become too large for the time, energy, health or capacity we have now.
And this is where we can get stuck.
Rather than adjusting the scale, we decide the activity no longer belongs in our lives at all.
If we can’t go for the walk we once managed, we don’t take a shorter one. If we can’t return properly to a hobby, we leave it untouched.
We treat the smaller version as a poor imitation of the real thing.
But the width isn’t a failed version of the length.
It’s the version that fits now.
And changing the scale is what allows the man to remain in the pool.
That matters because he isn’t only getting exercise.
By entering the pool, he has placed himself in an environment where other things can happen. He can see people, respond to what’s around him and become part of the life of the retirement village rather than simply observing it from the side.
Eventually, he collides with another swimmer.
The encounter is friendly, even flirtatious.
It’s a tiny moment, but it wouldn’t have happened if he’d decided that swimming only counted when he could complete a full length.
Changing the scale hasn’t diminished the experience.
It has made the experience possible.
I think we often underestimate the extent to which our environments shape the life available to us.
We tend to imagine that engagement begins with a feeling. First we become motivated, interested or confident, and then we act.
But often the action comes first.
We enter the pool, and something happens once we’re there.
The environment gives us something to respond to.
It places movement, ideas, people and possibility within reach.
But to enter it, we may need to let go of the idea that only the full-sized version counts.
There are, of course, real limits.
Bodies change. Health changes. Energy changes. The demands of work, money and caring for other people all affect what’s possible.
This isn’t an argument that we should deny those realities or force ourselves to keep performing at the same level forever.
The swimmers in Osman’s novel aren’t denying their age.
They’re working with it.
There’s a difference between accepting that our capacity has changed and deciding that a whole part of life is now closed to us.
There’s also a difference between adjusting our expectations and abandoning them altogether.
Perhaps we don’t need to expect ourselves to maintain the same pace, strength or level of achievement throughout our lives.
But we can continue to expect ourselves to participate.
To remain interested.
To keep learning.
To move in whatever way is available to us.
To enter places where we might encounter other people, new ideas or something we didn’t plan.
To stay involved in our own lives.
Perhaps growing older well isn’t about insisting that we can always swim the same lengths at the same speed.
Perhaps it’s about continuing to find the width.
🪞 Something to consider
Where have you stopped doing something because you can’t do it in the way you once did, or in the way you think it ought to be done?
What might the width version look like?
And what environment could you enter that would give movement, interest or connection a chance to find you?
🧭 Try this
Choose one activity, interest or form of connection that has quietly disappeared from your life.
Instead of trying to return to it in its full-sized form, change the scale.
Choose a version that fits the time, energy and capacity you have now, then place yourself in the environment where it can happen.
Don’t compare it with what you used to do.
The width is still swimming.