What Do You Call Vacation? And Home?

They're Intertwined

“Les grandes vacances sont une parenthèse enchantée où la vie reprend ses droits.”

Countryside-bound

Do you go home for the summer? Or do you leave it?

It’s summer, something I’ve always taken seriously. I spent 30 years living in France, so have learned from the best. Watching the French ‘do’ summer (and family homes) is an exercise in watching humans prioritise life, love and family alongside work, in an orderly, unquestioned way (see Pamela Clapp’s series on How The French Do Summer). Marrying a Brit who struggles mightily with not ‘doing’ is an ongoing lesson in cross-cultural wirings.

Back To Nature

Friday afternoon, Tigger and I tried out her new backpack and headed off on the train to Somerset. For two months. Watching a city puppy discover a country garden is a powerful metaphor for the unleashing of a soul into nature. She stared at the trees moving in the breeze with awe and wonder. Explored every nook and cranny of the kitchen garden and its abundance of new smells. Zoomed around the yard under the shadow of the evening bats. Slept through the night, tired out by fresh air, travel and a spot of gardening. Echoed my every sentiment exactly.

Many years ago, at a conference in Kitzbühl Austria, I heard a brilliant designer explain that he didn’t want to retire at 65 and have a lengthy, lazy series of decades by the beach. He preferred to flip those years into sabbaticals, beginning early in life, appearing every seven years, and lasting 12 months. I still remember the cool visual that accompanied this idea. A big orange block at the end of a life line, slicing and shifting into thin green injections of repetitive breaks across the life course. It seemed so enticing, so obviously superior a design for human learning, evolution and sustainability.

Summers and Sabbaticals as Strategic Play

“Le repos est le condiment du travail.”
Plutarque
“Rest is the seasoning of work.”

I decided to chunk it down even further. I have always run my own businesses - and my time. Why not claim summer to align with kids and faraway parents and cross-cultural travel obligations? It started with a couple of decades where we spent summers in a little village in upstate New York in the US, called Chautauqua. It was near both my mother and my in-laws, had a 9-week ‘season’ full of talks and music and dance. It had camp for kids starting age 3. It was a very early adopter of thoughtful, intergenerational design. A place for multiple generations to hang by the side of a pretty lake with lots to do for everyone at every age.

Our Chautauqua Table (Mom on left)

Summers became a time of learning, family and creativity. I’d gather my brood and friends, cook up a storm at a long, beautiful table made by my man, and take classes on writing, ageing and poetry. I’d also write books, do research, and read (lots) on an old Victorian porch. It nourished the pillars so essential to longevity - brain, love, and change (see below graphic inspired by Scott and Gratton’s The 100-Year Life).

These longer lives will require a different pacing than the old sprints. If we are going to be active and contributing for 60 or 70 years, we’ll need to better balance our time investments over the years. Summers and sabbaticals may become a key strategic play.

From my book, Thriving To 100

Seven years ago, when the kids had long moved into their own lives and twenties, and my mother got too old to get to her much-adored Chautauqua, we stopped going. Which had real estate repercussions. Life phases and changes so often do. Home, heart and gathering are deeply intertwined.

We sold the lovely old rooming house I had gotten cheap and filled with early century antiques. We downsized dramatically and got something closer to home, a little two-bedroom barn conversion in a beautifully green part of Somerset called The Mendips. We got it a couple of years before Covid hit, and gratefully spent most of the pandemic there.

It was perfect for a couple of empty nesters. The kids were far afield building their own lives, and we could get from London to our little slice of the countryside in a few hours’ drive - a huge simplification from our dog-laden international travels. It was small and easy to care for.

But seven years on, it’s time to think about upsizing.

OK, I know that at 63 and 70, this may seem crazy. But hear me out. The trend as couples age should be to gradually discard, downsize and disappear gracefully, right? That’s certainly a pretty common narrative, and a lot of what I read from older fellow substackers.

Everyone has a different familial or cultural approach to defining home. This week, I read a lovely piece from Anne Boyd on her ‘New Home By The Sea,’ about the hunt for the perfect next-chapter home. And another, from a different stage of life, about when to let the big old homes of our mid-lives behind and start to downsize, by Don Akchin on When’s The Best Time to Leave Home.

But you discover some surprising things as you age. Decades and chapters that noone ever told you about. That your own parents didn’t live. My mother lived in the same house (after an early life full of forced moving) for 65 years. I’ve moved countless times. Across countries. And homes. I fall in love with houses in much the same way I fall in love with people. Deeply and completely. Not necessarily for life. Typical of Third Country Kids (TCKs are kids of a binationals who grow up in a 3rd culture country) - they move seamlessly, settle less naturally.

“Il faut toute la vie pour apprendre à vivre.”
Seneca
“It takes a whole life to learn how to live.”

So at 63, I find myself in a new phase. My geographies have downsized, but not my role. My mother died and her Toronto home, our family gathering place, has been sold. My daughter has chosen, after a decade of wandering the world, to move to London (miracle of miracles, and not a gift I gave my own mother, which makes me feel retroactively guilty). My son has gifted me two tiny grand-daughters… in Senegal.

I find the urge to gather returns, perhaps with even more urgency, as you age. Or at least to create the offer of a gathering place, or refuge, for a family that has grown beyond our London pad. Somewhere kids can come to rest and be held en famille, something I appreciated when escaping to my mother’s house well into middle age. Somewhere grandkids can come to summer while their parents work on. Somewhere with room for every soul you love. So you don’t have to count. You can create a loving haven in the midst of the storm. And you can throw open the doors in a world that is shutting them ever more violently.

Ageing in Motion

"Let your home be your mast and not your anchor."

Khalil Gibran

So in April, over Anniversary dinner, I suggested to the man that it was time to move on. I thought it was a romantic theme for a conversation. I’m afraid he didn’t. After a moment of total disbelief, and a rather large bottle of very nice Puglian wine, he began to countenance that it might not be an awful idea. We’ve spent much of the spring putting this little plan into action and hunting for our next chapter dwelling.

I often think of the work of Ryan Frederick, and his book Right Place, Right Time, (see his podcast interview here) in mind. He doesn’t believe in ‘ageing in place.’ He suggests thinking more about ‘ageing in community.’ He would agree that upsizing can be countenanced. And would approve of the other priorities we set to acknowledge our age and stage.

The first was to get a house near a train line from nearby Waterloo Station. So we can get there without a car if we start to go blind or break a leg or any of the other myriad things that become statistically more likely in the coming decade. The next was to get both a bedroom and bathroom on the ground floor, neither of which we have in London or in the Barn. Just in case something happens and our mobility is challenged. Did you know that only 3% of the US housing stock meets ‘international design’ principles friendly to ageing bodies? Probably less in the UK.

After weeks of a deep addiction to Rightmove, and an entertaining wander around the English countryside from Dorset to Wiltshire (and discovering the reality behind these names that remain largely literary references to me) we found a big beautiful old thing, once a granary and a dairy in a very old barn configuration. It’s in the Southern side of Somerset, not far from the beach and the Dorset border. It’s what would generously be referred to as ‘a project.’

While we think we’re old enough to factor age into our next-seven-year house and family-holding dreams, we think we’re young enough for a project. And upsizing. Think we’re crazy? Let me know. I’d say time will tell.

Last Monday, while I was in Lisbon teaching our Longevity Leadership programme, I got news that our little Barn had sold and the house we made an offer on had accepted. Both on the same day!

The universe is winking. I hope you are too.

Happy summer, reader dear. What are your plans? Are you working through, flying far or digging in somewhere? Thanks, as ever, for joining me on the ride.

“My house says to me, ‘do not leave me, for here dwells your past.’ And the road says to me, ‘Come and follow me, for I am your future.’ And I say to both my house and the road, ‘I have no past, nor have I a future. If I stay here, there is a going in my staying; and if I go there is a staying in my going.’”

Khalil Gibran