Earlier this summer I turned sixty. I wrote about it here at the time, about how it didn’t feel like a milestone so much as a nudge, a tap on the shoulder from someone leaning over to say you know you don’t have forever, don’t you? I talked about sitting down and asking AI to write my own obituary as a strange kind of experiment, and how it turned out to be less about death than I expected and more like a mirror. You end up seeing the shape of a life you’ve been too busy living to properly notice.
That reflection didn’t stop when the post went up. If anything, it kept going.
Over the months before and after the great event I found myself returning, again and again, to a handful of questions I hadn’t dealt with properly before. What does it mean to live well once you’ve admitted the time you have left is limited? What do we actually owe to the people, places and communities that briefly become part of our lives? And, more than anything else, what will remain after we’re gone?
I don’t have tidy answers to any of this. But over the last few months I have been writing a short book where I’ve tried to honestly and openly sit with the questions. That book is ready to share with you now, and it’s called Beautifully Borrowed: Twelve Reflections on Mortality, Attention and What We Leave Behind.
It grew out of a realisation that arrived, unannounced, earlier this summer while I was walking down my garden, that almost nothing in my life truly belonged to me. The places we love, the people we know, the knowledge we’ve gathered, even the years we’re given, all of it borrowed, held for a while and eventually passed on. Once I stopped fighting that idea and started paying attention to it instead, things started to sit far more comfortably with me.
The book itself is a companion to The Little Book of Mindful Social Change, though it stands on its own. That earlier book was written for anyone trying to do good in the world. This one is for anyone trying to make sense of the fact that their time to do so is limited. Which is probably most of us.
Twelve short reflections. Some drawn from a Ugandan forest, some from a box of old keepsakes I’d carried through a bunch of house moves without ever properly opening, one from a pair of socks I somehow still own from my first trip to Africa in 1993. Nothing dramatic. Just an attempt to notice what’s actually here, before it isn’t.
It’ll be available soon for Kindle and in paperback and hardback, but given you’ve found your way to this post you can read more and grab an early exclusive PDF copy here.