The gifts of getting older by Lynne Franks

Guest blog by Lynne Franks OBE. 

Lynne Franks reflects on ageing, staying active and continuing to find adventure in everyday life.

Getting older may bring a few more aches and pains, but it needn’t mean becoming less curious, active or adventurous. Lynne Franks shares her honest reflections on listening to her body while continuing to embrace the people, places and experiences that give life meaning.

About Lynne Franks

Lynne Franks OBE has spent more than five decades spotting trends, challenging convention and helping women make their voices heard. After founding one of Britain’s best-known PR agencies at just 21, she helped put London Fashion Week on the map and worked with some of fashion’s most influential names—her colourful PR years even helped inspire the character of Edina in Absolutely Fabulous.

Lynne later founded SEED, bringing together women’s empowerment, sustainable enterprise and purposeful living. Now based in Somerset, she continues to write, campaign, coach and create spaces for women to connect and lead change. A mother of two and grandmother of seven, Lynne remains a firm believer that curiosity, purpose and adventure have no age limit.

I am always delighted to wake up in the morning with the excitement of wondering what the day will bring. And then the awareness of my aches and pains together with the stiffness of my ageing body kicks in, with the need to pull up the energy to push the dog off, get out of bed and have my morning pee.

It’s certainly not an elegant lift-off to the day and fortunate that it’s not seen by anyone else other than Bear the dog, who is far more interested in having his morning tummy tickle.

Meanwhile I am mentally running through the day’s activities, decisions that need to be made and where my focus has to lie. It’s one of the strange contradictions of ageing. Inside my head I don’t feel particularly different from the woman I was twenty, thirty or even forty years ago. I am still curious. Still excited by new ideas. Still planning things. Still wanting to make a difference. Still falling in love with possibilities.

It’s my body that occasionally sends me the memo reminding me that quite a few years have passed. A knee complains. A hip makes itself known. Getting up from the floor requires a little more strategy than it once did. I find myself making noises when I bend down which I’m absolutely certain I never used to make.

And then, just as I was thinking about all this, someone sent me a photograph of myself taken in the 1980s. I put it on Instagram and the response was extraordinary. There I was, looking young, glamorous and, I can now see, beautiful. But I don’t remember feeling particularly beautiful at the time.

Seeing ourselves differently

And isn’t that so often the way? When we are young we worry about the shape of our thighs, whether our hair looks right, whether we are attractive enough, thin enough or fashionable enough. We don’t wake up every morning thinking, How extraordinary — my body works. I can run upstairs. I can dance all night. I can see, hear, taste, touch, travel, work and recover from almost anything.

We take health and youth for granted because we can’t imagine not having them. Looking at that photograph all these years later, I wanted to reach back through time and tell that younger woman: Look at you. You are absolutely fine exactly as you are.

Which makes me particularly sad when I see so many young women today messing around with their faces and bodies before they have even had the chance to grow into them. I am certainly not against self-improvement. I had plastic surgery myself when I was nineteen although in my case it was largely to help me breathe better because I had a deviated septum.

It didn’t particularly improve my breathing but it made me feel better about my looks. And me being me, it became a big feature in Petticoat Magazine, the pioneering young women’s magazine where I worked alongside Eve Pollard and Janet Street-Porter.

So this isn’t about judgement. It is about wishing that young women — and increasingly young men too — could see themselves through the eyes of their future selves and realise just how perfect they already are.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of getting older. We finally begin to see the beauty we couldn’t see while we had it. But there is another strange thing about getting older. Although the woman in the mirror undoubtedly changes, the person looking out through her eyes doesn’t necessarily change very much at all. I still feel like me!

Of course I have lived, learned, loved and lost a great deal since that photograph was taken. Hopefully I have gathered a little wisdom along the way. But the essential energy inside — the curiosity, the excitement, the desire to create things, have adventures and make things happen — feels surprisingly similar.

Keeping our young energy alive

The wonderful and sorely missed Dolly Parton once said, “I don’t feel my age, I don’t work my age, I don’t think my age.” And when asked how she stayed young, her answer was wonderfully simple: “Because I don’t have time to age.”

I know exactly what she means. Perhaps staying young has far less to do with trying to look young and much more to do with keeping our young energy alive.

Being curious. Having something to look forward to. Spending time with people of different generations. Learning something new. Starting projects when other people think we should be slowing down. Being silly. Dancing. Falling in love — with a person, an idea, a place, a cause or simply with life again.

Keeping the body moving

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life discussing my ailments. I don’t want every conversation with friends to become a medical bulletin. Nor do I believe the answer to every ache and pain necessarily lies in another pill or potion. I want to keep reminding my body what it can do.

Get out into nature. Walk. Swim. Dance. Stretch. Breathe deeply. Eat food that actually nourishes me. Put my hands in the earth. Laugh until my stomach hurts. Fill my days with people I love, ideas that excite me and work that gives me purpose.

And every now and then, jump up and down for no reason other than to remind myself that I still can. Of course the aches and pains don’t magically disappear. The knees may still grumble and the back may still have something to say first thing in the morning.

But somehow they sink into the background when life itself is calling loudly enough. Our bodies inevitably carry the evidence of the years. Why shouldn’t they? They have carried us through them.

Maybe ageing isn’t about desperately trying to hold onto the body we once had. Maybe it is about loving the body we have now, thanking it for how far it has carried us and keeping it moving towards whatever comes next.

And perhaps that is what I would tell that young woman in the photograph if I could sit down with her today. Don’t waste so much time worrying about how you look.

Dance in that body. Swim in it. Travel in it. Love in it. Laugh in it. Look after it. And above all, appreciate it.

Because one day, many years from now, you may come across an old photograph and look at that young woman staring back at you and think:

My God. She was beautiful.

And then look in the mirror at the woman you are today and realise:

She still is.

What keeps you feeling active, curious and connected as you get older?

Adventure at every age

I did a few days cleansing at The Sanctuary on Koh Phangan last year. This iconic natural haven with world-class food is owned by a friend of mine.

Spending some time sandwiched between a beautiful beach & jungle is so restorative: A little thoughtful preparation can help us continue enjoying the experiences that make us feel most alive. Wherever that is! 

This article was originally published by Lynne Franks and has been adapted for incognito with her permission.

Follow Lynne’s Words of Wisdom on Substack @lynnefranks