15/06/2026
Sounds like good advice to me
There is a woman who spent her late eighties trying to teach us how to live. Her name is Margareta Magnusson. She was born in a year when Swedish women were expected to live to sixty-six. Her mother died at sixty-eight, punctual as a train.
Magnusson blew past that number twenty years ago and kept going, painting, laughing, accumulating the unhurried wisdom of someone who had outlived her own expiration date by decades and developed, in that extra time, some thoughts she very much wanted to share.
The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly is the result. Written at eighty-eight, by a woman the statistics had long since stopped counting on.
And now that she is gone - she died on March 12th - it reads differently, not as advice from someone still living it, but as a letter. Left behind, deliberately, for everyone still trying to figure out how to do this; how to be alive, fully and without apology, for as long as they are given.
I am grateful she wrote it down.
1. Aging does not steal your humanity. It reveals it.
One of the most beautiful things about this book is the way Magnusson strips aging of all the unnecessary drama people attach to it. She speaks openly about forgetting things, becoming tired more easily, losing friends, watching her body change. But there is no self-pity in her voice. No desperation to appear younger than she is.
Just honesty. And reading that honesty felt strangely emotional to me because so much of modern life feels built around pretending. Pretending we are fine. Pretending we are not scared. Pretending we are not changing. But old age, at least in Magnusson’s hands, feels like the gradual shedding of performance.
You stop trying to become impressive. You stop shaping yourself into what the world applauds. You finally become yourself without apology. And maybe that is why her words feel so freeing.
2. Curiosity is an act of courage at any age.
What keeps Magnusson vivid on the page is not wisdom exactly — it is appetite. She is still curious. Still delighted. Still willing to be surprised. And she makes the case, gently but firmly, that curiosity is not a young person's luxury. It is a choice. Available at every age, to anyone willing to stop performing certainty long enough to admit they still do not know everything. Which, it turns out, is the beginning of living well.
3. Death is not the opposite of life. Forgetting to live is.
There is a softness beneath this entire book that caught me completely off guard. Magnusson does not deny death. She talks about it openly, almost casually at times. Not because she is unafraid, but because she understands something many younger people do not yet understand:
Death was always part of the agreement. The tragedy is not that life ends. The tragedy is how many people forget to inhabit it while they are here.
Magnusson painted into old age. She laughed into old age. She wrote into old age with the warmth and directness of someone who had nothing left to prove and everything still left to say. And then on March 12th, she was gone. Exuberantly, fully, completely here, and then not.
I keep thinking about what it means that she spent her final years writing books about how to live. Not how to avoid death. Not how to stay young. How to actually, genuinely, with full presence and without apology, live. That was the whole project.
That was the letter she kept writing in different forms and leaving for the rest of us.
She is gone now. But the letter remains.
Read it while you still have the afternoon to sit with it. While the light is still coming through the window. While the people you love are still in the next room and you still have the entirely ordinary, entirely extraordinary chance to put down whatever you are rushing toward and be, for a moment, completely here.
She spent nearly a century learning that this moment, unremarkable, yet quietly yours, was always the whole point.
I believe her.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/3Q0gdsd
