Every woman can age exquisitely. I have been thinking about my own aging process, but not about wrinkles, bunions, sagging boobs, or grey hair. To me, the elixir of aging exquisitely has nothing to do with preserving the woman we once were. It comes when a woman maintains an appreciation and appetite for life and has the courage to ask herself, What part of me have I neglected that is ready to come into the room?

As I sit at my computer in my condo in the sky, I realize I have been learning how to age exquisitely since I was a young woman. We collect little lessons throughout our lives, often without realizing their importance at the time. I remember a friend from Texas who used to answer her telephone with a delightful, “Good morning!” Hearing those two words always made me happy, and from that moment forward, I adopted them as my own morning greeting. My Ultimate Concierge loved my “good morning,” and eventually he followed suit. Think for a moment about the people who have crossed your path and quietly influenced the woman you became. I have had many.

Aging exquisitely, I have decided, is partly the accumulation of those experiences. But it is also our willingness to keep accumulating them.

Disturb Your Routine To Age Exquisitely

How does a woman whose lifestyle has become flat deliberately make her life feel exquisitely alive again? Take a little risk, Darling. Interrupt your own pattern. You do not necessarily need an entirely new life. Sometimes you simply need to disturb the life you already have. A life can become too beige, and you know beige is the one color I never wear!

A woman can be alive without feeling as though she is truly living. Her day is orderly. Her home is comfortable. Her calendar is predictable. She knows which friends she will see and what everyone expects of her. Nothing is necessarily wrong, and, Darling, that is often the problem. A life does not have to be terrible before it needs changing. Sometimes we become so efficient at living that we slowly squeeze some of the life out of it. I am asking you to surprise yourself.

Take yourself somewhere you have never been, even if it is only a neighborhood away. Learn something new. Attend a lecture where you know no one. Read newspapers, magazines, and the Wall Street Journal and remain aware of what is happening in the world. Travel solo or join a group going somewhere that piques your interest. Change your hairstyle. Paint the town red and paint your nails while you are at it! Dab on your red lipstick, buy a new handbag, and fill it with fresh thoughts.

This is where risk enters, but I am not necessarily talking about dangerous or life-changing risks. I am talking about the risk of becoming a little different from the woman you were yesterday. Once you step outside your familiar pattern, you may discover a talent you never tested, friendships you never imagined, and desires you never gave yourself permission to explore. Awareness brings new thoughts, and new thoughts can open an entirely new page in your private world.

Put a Crack in the Predictable

Instead of telling yourself you must completely reinvent your life, begin smaller. Add one thing this week that has always tempted you. Put a tiny crack in your routine and allow something unexpected to slip through. I have goosebumps for you just thinking about it!

I watched this happen with my daughter-in-law, whom I love dearly. She was in a slump, and I hounded and hounded her to join a synagogue. She procrastinated and procrastinated, while I continued insisting. Once she finally joined, I encouraged her to ask whether there was a mahjong group because I wanted her to meet people. She told me she did not know how to play. “You will learn!” I told her. And, Darling, long story short, she met the man of her dreams at the mahjong table!

With a little encouragement from a loving mother-in-law, she broke her own rhythm. She was not taking a dangerous risk. She was simply stepping outside the predictable. That is an important part of learning to age exquisitely. Women who live too safely can slowly become enclosed by their routines. Then one small disruption wakes them up. The activity itself is not always what matters. The disruption matters because when you change your pace, you change what you notice. When you change what you notice, possibilities suddenly appear. And possibilities almost always require a little courage. Exquisite aging is not simply about adding more years to your life. It is about continuing to add life to your years.

 

When My Own Life Became Predictable

I hope my story helps some of you because I now find myself having to take my own advice. My life has changed drastically. I ask myself questions I never imagined having to ask: How am I going to go on without my loving Alpha lion, my Ultimate Concierge? What will my life look like? What will my pace become? What will my purpose become? I do not know. And yes, it frightens me.

For the past three years, because of my Ultimate Concierge’s illness, my life has settled into a familiar daily rhythm. I have completed projects, written, learned, and remained curious within the walls of our condo in the sky, but my social life outside those walls essentially froze. And a social life is about much more than lunch with girlfriends or dinner with couples.

I learned that when a woman’s world contracts, what she loses is not simply entertainment or companionship. She can also begin to lose her place in the larger world. My Ultimate Concierge’s illness meant I stopped traveling, attending museum events and the theatre, shopping, dining out, attending lectures, laughing with friends at parties, and moving through many of the public spaces that had always been woven into our life together. Along with those activities, several quieter things disappeared. I call one of them cultural currency.

Protecting Your Cultural Currency

Cultural currency is the stream of new things that keeps us in conversation with our own time. It may be an extraordinary painting, an unusual play, a hotel in Paris, a designer’s new collection, a restaurant everyone is discussing, a book, an idea, a neighborhood, or a person you meet unexpectedly. Public life gives a woman presence. Getting dressed and walking into a theatre, sitting in a museum café, traveling through an airport, browsing through a store, or sitting beside a stranger at dinner quietly tells us, I am still participating in life.

A social life is not only made up of planned invitations. It is also the woman you meet at an exhibition, the acquaintance sitting next to you at dinner, or the unexpected conversation that begins in a hotel elevator. When your world contracts, chance has fewer doors through which to enter. Eventually, you can begin to lose your feeling of belonging to the present.

Culture keeps us connected to our own time through artists, restaurants, fashion, architecture, books, ideas, cities, conversations, and people. Without those encounters, the world can begin to feel as if it is moving along outside my window on the seventy-first floor while I remain behind the glass.

And when a woman is shut away from that world long enough, she can also lose some of her social confidence. It is not because she has become less interesting. It is because she is accumulating fewer new experiences. She may begin to feel rusty entering a room, meeting new people, making small talk, or simply joining the conversation. I understand this now in a way I never did before.

 

A Woman’s Identity Is Her Crowning Glory

A woman’s identity is her crowning glory. And when circumstances shrink that identity, the loss can run very deep. For most of my life, I had many identities operating at once. I was a wife, mother, grandmother, girlfriend, writer, traveler, hostess, businesswoman, shopper, friend, curious woman, and partner to my Ultimate Concierge. We traveled. We entertained. I dressed for different occasions. I walked into unfamiliar rooms. I discovered places, people, cultures, foods, ideas, and adventures.

Then, little by little, one identity became disproportionately large. Caregiver. Florence Nightingale. For the past three years, that role has been my calling. I would not change the love or devotion behind it. Caring for my guy is not something I regret. Quite the opposite. But I can acknowledge what disappeared at the same time.

When a woman’s calendar empties and her world becomes present-tense, there is another type of loneliness. It is not simply being physically alone. It can feel like social disappearing. That realization is forcing me to think differently about what it will mean for me to age exquisitely during the next passage of my life.

How Will I Reenter the World?

I have spent years living a life larger than large with my Ultimate Concierge beside me. He helped me navigate the world, protected me, anticipated things before I had to think about them, and made our life together feel wonderful. He was my compass, my protector, my advisor, my Alpha lion. We were a perfect team.

And now I find myself facing questions without tidy answers. How will I eventually go on without his presence? How will I walk back into the world of the living? How will I regain the cultural currency that became stagnant while my attention and heart were devoted to him? I think about a future in which he will no longer stand beside me, and I can hardly breathe. I will miss his smile, those blue eyes staring at me, and his hand holding mine tightly and giving me the confidence of a queen.

There will be moments when I am frightened. There may be moments when going forward seems almost impossible. Yet somewhere inside me, I also know I will have a choice. I can close the door on the life I once knew and allow silence to become my permanent companion, or I can eventually choose to go on. Not because going on will be easy. Not because I will stop loving or missing him. I will go on because life will still be standing at my door. Perhaps that is one of the most difficult lessons in learning to age exquisitely: sometimes change is not simply something that happens to us. Eventually, we must decide what we will do with it.

I Must Reenter as the Woman I Am Now

When that passage arrives, I cannot expect to step back into the exact world I left three years earlier. Nor should I. I must reenter the world as the woman I am now, carrying everything these years have taught me. I will have to change my pace and scenery. I will need to say yes to an invitation I might instinctively decline. I may take a trip. I may learn something completely outside my orbit. I may sit at a table with women half my age and discover that we have far more to say to one another than our birth certificates would suggest.

Risk does not have to mean making a gigantic move. I have no idea what my next journey will look like. But I know this: if I want to survive, I will have to remain exquisitely alive. And perhaps that is why I am writing this story as much for myself as I am for you. I, too, am searching for the answer to how to age exquisitely.

My Little Green Ladder Has an Answer

I am sitting on my little green ladder in my closet as I write these thoughts. It is an odd place to contemplate aging, surrounded by clothes I once wore easily, shoes that carried me beside my Ultimate Concierge through cities around the world, and handbags that held the passports, red lipstick, and secrets of a woman who was always going somewhere.

Today I am facing questions that cannot be dressed up. How do I age exquisitely on two fronts: learning to eventually live without the man who built this extraordinary life beside me and reclaiming my place in the cultural and social world beyond the walls of my condo in the sky?

My little green ladder gives me a visual lecture every time I look at her. I cannot stay on the bottom step forever. Eventually, I will have to climb. And when I do, I will not be returning to the world empty-handed.

Different Kind of Fortune

For three years, I may have lost some of my cultural currency, but I have accumulated another kind of wealth. I have earned the currency of devotion, responsibility, patience, caring for another human being when he needs me most and learning what love looks like when the glamorous parts of life disappear. That is not lesser currency. Darling, it may be among the most valuable fortunes I have ever accumulated.

My little green ladder reminds me that the currency of a fully lived life is not measured solely by where we travel, which events we attend, the people we meet, or the invitations we receive. It is also measured by what we learn when we dedicate ourselves to something larger than ourselves.

After three years devoted to my Ultimate Concierge, I can acknowledge that I lost some of my social and cultural currency. But as I sit here surrounded by the beautiful pieces of my former life, I understand that I accumulated a different fortune within these walls. One day, I will carry that fortune back into the world with me. I will not try to recreate the exact life I once had because I am no longer exactly the woman who lived it.

Build Something New

I will build something new. And whatever I build will be richer because of what I learned, what I gave, and how deeply I loved my guy. My guiding light will be making my Ultimate Concierge proud. That, to me, is how a woman ages exquisitely. She does not desperately hold on to the woman she once was. She honors her, carries her wisdom forward, and remains curious about the woman who is still waiting to come into the room.

We disrupt the beige, take the next step, participate, continue learning and open the door when life knocks again. When our rhythm changes, as every woman’s eventually will, we gather everything the previous chapter taught us and carry it into the next one. That is how I intend to age exquisitely. Not perfectly. Not without grief, fear, or uncertainty. But fully alive, still climbing my little green ladder, still curious about what waits on the next step, and still willing to discover who I am becoming.

Are you aging exquisitely? What part of yourself have you neglected that might be ready to come into the room? And what is one small way you could disrupt your routine this week and let a little more life in?