New growth can happen in every season of a life.
We associate spring with youth. First green, first blossom, first rush of energy after a long winter. It is an old habit of the mind: to treat new growth as if it belonged only to the beginning of things.
It does not. A tree that has already stood for decades still puts out new wood. A garden that has been tended for years can still be replanted. And a human life, well past the age our culture has marked as finished, can still grow — in the body, yes, but also in the mind, in work, and in money.
September is Healthy Ageing Awareness Month. This year’s theme, ‘Curiosity Has No Age Limit’, is a useful correction. Curiosity is not a luxury of the young. It is one of the ways the world keeps opening.
At Hoogland, we have watched this for nearly fifty years. Guests arrive believing the best of their vitality is behind them. They leave having remembered that body and mind are not finished articles. They are unique living systems. Living systems respond to change and challenge.
“No one is so old that he thinks he cannot live one more year.”
— Cicero, 44 BC
Fauja Singh Had to Grow a Second Life
Fauja Singh did not walk until he was five. In his village in Punjab, they called him Danda—stick—because his legs were so weak he needed one. He grew into a farmer, married Gian Kaur and raised a family. Then, in his eighties, the centre of his life collapsed.
His wife died in 1992. He left India to live with a son in East London. Two years later, another son, Kuldip, was killed in a construction accident. He had already lost a daughter after she gave birth. Grief of that kind can close a person. For a time it closed him. Villagers later remembered him sitting for hours at the cremation ground.
What opened him again was running. In London he met older men who ran together and a coach, Harmander Singh. At eighty-nine, he ran the London Marathon. He would complete nine of them. In 2011, in Toronto, he became the first person on record to finish a marathon after turning one hundred. Rural India in 1911 did not issue him a birth certificate, so Guinness never listed him. The world still knew him as the Turbaned Tornado.
“Running showed me kindness and brought me back to life by making me forget all my traumas and sorrows.” — Fauja Singh, at 102
He was not a lifelong athlete who simply continued. After devastating loss, he had to invent a new life. Purpose did that work. Movement did that work. So did belonging—a coach, a club, a reason to get up. He lived to 114. The last chapter was not an afterthought. It was the chapter that made him known.
“As you get older three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can’t remember the other two.” — Norman Wisdom
Famous Fortunes Found After Sixty
Harland Sanders left school in the seventh grade. He cooked, farmed, sold insurance, and ran a service station. In Corbin, Kentucky, his roadside café became known for fried chicken. Then a new highway pulled the traffic away. In 1956, in his mid-sixties, he sold the place at auction and at a loss. What remained was a recipe, a few early licensing deals and a Social Security cheque of about a hundred and five dollars a month. He slept in his car between sales calls and carried pressure cookers in the boot.
He had already shown the recipe to Pete Harman in Salt Lake City in 1952. After Corbin failed, he stopped treating the café as the business and started treating the method as the business. He drove from restaurant to restaurant offering to teach his way of cooking chicken in exchange for a nickel a bird. By the early 1960s, there were hundreds of Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. In 1964, at seventy-three, he sold the American company for two million dollars—a fortune then, not a billionaire’s hoard—and spent the rest of his life as the face of the brand. He did not get rich because retirement is magic. He got rich because, when the old asset died, he still had a skill and enough hunger to sleep in a car.
“I’m at an age when my back goes out more than I do.” — Phyllis Diller
Lachhman Das Mittal’s money arrived later still, and by a different road. He was not a poor man with a secret recipe. He was an LIC man from Hoshiarpur—agent from 1955, later a deputy zonal manager—with a master’s in English and Urdu. Forbes records that he left the state insurer in 1990, at about sixty.
He read and wrote Urdu poetry in retirement and helped with the family’s farm-implements work, seed drills and wheat threshers under the Sonalika name.
Farmers kept asking for a tractor from the same house. In his mid-sixties, he built that company. International Tractors, selling as Sonalika, became India’s third-largest tractor maker. The Japanese firm Yanmar later took a stake.
Mittal, now in his nineties, is a billionaire on the Forbes list. The point is not that everyone can do this. The point is that a salaried career can still be a preface. He started the work that made the fortune after the age at which most people stop starting things.
“My mother always used to say, ‘The older you get, the better you get. Unless you’re a banana.’” — Betty White
Charles Betty was born in 1923. He left school at fourteen without qualifications. At eighteen, he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers, fought in France, was wounded and came home. On a noticeboard after demobilisation he saw that the country needed teachers. He had no certificates. He trained in Liverpool anyway and spent the next decades as a teacher, a headteacher of two schools and a school inspector. He retired at seventy.
Retirement was not the end of the work. He completed master’s degrees, then an American doctorate by distance learning. Living in Spain and caring for his wife Eileen, he enrolled at the University of Northampton and wrote a research thesis on why older British expatriates return from Spain to the United Kingdom as they become more vulnerable. In 2018, at ninety-five, he became the oldest person awarded a PhD by a British university. He said he had been told, when he first moved to Spain, that you live longer if you laugh a lot and keep your mind occupied. A man told at fourteen that school was finished kept using his mind until the mind produced original research in his nineties, while he was still responsible for someone he loved.
“You can’t help getting older, but you don’t have to get old.” — George Burns
Anna Mary Robertson Moses spent most of her life on farms. After her husband died, she lived with her son’s family and embroidered to keep busy. Arthritis made the needle too difficult. In her late seventies, she began to paint instead—first copies of prints and postcards, then scenes from memory. She hung the pictures at county fairs next to her jam. The jam won ribbons. The paintings did not, until a collector saw them in a pharmacy window and bought them all.
By 1940, New York galleries knew her as Grandma Moses. Hallmark put her work on greeting cards. Time put her on its cover. She painted into her nineties and finished more than a thousand pictures. She had wanted to paint earlier. She said she simply had not had time until she was seventy-eight. Betty’s late work was argument and evidence. Hers was memory, given a new hand. Both are mind. Both began when a sensible person would have stopped.
“Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.” — Bob Hope
Mature Bodies Can Still Be Rebuilt
Muscle is not the whole story of ageing, but it is not a side story either. Muscle is how you get off the floor, carry a grandchild and stay out of a wheelchair.
Charles Eugster spent decades as a dentist—seated, precise, long hours. By his mid-eighties, he did not like the man in the mirror. “I looked a mess,” he said. “I was having a late-life crisis.” He had already returned to rowing in his sixties. At eighty-seven, he joined a bodybuilding club and hired a former Mr Universe. Within a year the fat had gone down and the muscle had come up. He was frank about the motive. Vanity. He wanted to turn the heads of “the sexy young seventy-year-old girls on the beach.” He collected more than a hundred fitness trophies, took up sprinting in his mid-nineties and set age-group records. He used to tell audiences that retirement is not the end. It can be a new beginning—a chance to build a new body. He died at ninety-seven.
“No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.”— Oscar Wilde
Emma Mazzenga stopped competitive running in her late twenties to care for her mother and raise a family, returned to the track at fifty-three and in her nineties still holds age-group world records. Researchers looking at her muscle have found mitochondrial function closer to a healthy twenty-year-old than to the usual picture of ninety.
Ernestine Shepherd started exercise at fifty-six after a swimsuit fitting with her sister, kept going after her sister died and became, for a time, the world’s oldest competitive female bodybuilder.
Diana Nyad failed the Cuba-to-Florida swim at twenty-eight and completed it at sixty-four, fifty-three hours in the water, no shark cage.
None of these people had an exemption from ageing. They had a reason, a practice and other people.
Brains Keep Ripening After Sixty
Popular culture still treats twenty-five as the age at which the brain is done. Current research is less flattering to youth and much kinder to later life.
A 2025 analysis in the journal Intelligence, combining many well-measured psychological traits across the lifespan, found that overall mental functioning often peaks between fifty-five and sixty.
Conscientiousness—the capacity to stay with a plan, keep a promise, run a household, finish what you start—tends to peak around sixty-five.
Emotional stability tends to peak around seventy-five.
Moral reasoning and the ability to resist cognitive biases can keep improving into the seventies and even the eighties.
This does not mean every seventy-five-year-old is wise or that processing speed does not slow. It means ageing is not simple subtraction. Some faculties decline. Others ripen. A person who has lived long enough to lose certain reflexes may also, at last, have the emotional equipment the rest of us were told arrived in early adulthood.
Cambridge researchers mapping the brain’s connections across the whole lifespan have described major turning points around ages nine, thirty-two, sixty-six and eighty-three. The architecture changes. It does not stop mattering.
Years after sixty are not an epilogue. For many people, they are the first time the inner life is actually ready for the work of being human.
“I still chase women, but only downhill.” — Bob Hope
Sister Mary Outlived Her Own Scan
If we needed one story to humble our faith in pictures of the brain, it would be Sister Mary’s.
She was a School Sister of Notre Dame, one of 678 nuns who joined what became the Nun Study—a decades-long investigation of ageing and dementia led by David Snowdon. The sisters agreed to yearly cognitive testing and, at the end, to donate their brains. Sister Mary taught for forty-two years. She was still doing part-time teaching into her eighties. She died in 1993 at 101. Months before her death, she still scored remarkably well on standard cognitive tests. Snowdon called her the gold standard for successful cognitive ageing in the study.
Then they examined her brain. It was full of the plaques and tangles that define Alzheimer’s disease. By the pathology, she should have been lost. She was not. Other sisters showed the opposite pattern: less visible damage, more symptoms in life. The amount of disease in the tissue did not reliably predict whether a person was still present.
What protected her is now discussed as cognitive reserve and resilience—the brain’s capacity to keep working despite damage. Reserve is not magic. It is built over a lifetime by language, learning, purpose, relationships, physical health and daily use of the mind. A scan, a score, a moment of forgetfulness, is not a verdict. Function in the living world still matters more than the image of the organ.
“I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” — Winston Churchill
Self-Care, Company, and a Reason
The World Health Organization’s definition of health is still the best one we have: “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease”.
Healthy ageing sits inside that sentence. It is not a diet. It is not a supplement. It is three things working together.
Self-care.
The body that will carry you through the next decade is the body you are inhabiting now. Sleep, food you can recognise, daily movement, time outdoors, the management of blood pressure and blood sugar, the willingness to recover before you break—these are not indulgences. They are how a nervous system and a metabolism stay available for a life. People who spend their health gaining wealth often discover, too late, that they must spend the wealth trying to buy the health back. The cheaper time to invest is while you still have both.
Social connection.
Loneliness is not a mood. It is a physiological stressor. People who age well are almost never people who did it alone. Fauja Singh had a coach and a club. Eugster had a trainer. Betty had a university and a wife he was still looking after. Moses had a family farm and, later, a dealer who believed her. A meal with someone you trust, a weekly walk with a neighbour, a community that expects you to arrive—these are medicine.
Purpose.
A reason larger than comfort. It need not be a marathon or a doctorate. It can be a grandchild who needs to be collected, a garden that will die if you do not water it, a skill you have not finished learning, a person who relies on your judgement. Purpose organises the day. Without it, self-care becomes a hobby and connection becomes optional. With it, the difficult parts of looking after yourself start to make sense.
“People say, ‘But Betty, Facebook is a great way to connect with old friends.’ Well, at my age, if I want to connect with old friends I need a Ouija board.”
Well-Intentioned Harm
There is a particular way of loving older people that looks like care and behaves like a slow theft. It happens when we look after someone by removing the duties that keep them intact. We take over the planning.
We make the decisions.
We do the navigation in the car and then, a little later, we take the keys.
We stop asking them to choose the restaurant, remember the appointment, pay the account, find the way to the shop. We do it because we are afraid they will get it wrong. We do it because it is quicker. We do it because it feels like devotion.
Research on this pattern is uncomfortable. When caregivers systematically take over mobility, household tasks and decisions—even with the best intentions—older adults lose practice in the skills that maintain independence.
Researchers have described informal caregiver-induced forced immobility: the well-meant restriction of movement out of fear of falls. Others have documented paternalistic care in which people feel unable to make decisions about their own lives and become anxious, frustrated and smaller. Safety pursued at the expense of agency does not only protect. It can also depress, isolate and speed the decline it was meant to prevent.
“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.” — Oscar Wilde
The brain is a use-it-or-lose-it organ in the most ordinary sense. Planning, deciding, navigating, sequencing a day—these are executive functions. They strengthen with demand and weaken without it. If you love someone, hold them responsible for what they can still do. Let them take longer. Let them get it slightly wrong. Stand nearby, not in front. Help with the part that is truly unsafe; leave the rest in their hands. Dignity is not a feeling we give people. It is a set of tasks we still allow them to own.
This is as true for those of us who are not yet old as it is for our parents. Every time we outsource a difficulty we could still meet—the walk, the conversation, the decision, the meal we cook ourselves—we rehearse a smaller future.
Launch Pad or Top-Up
Hoogland is not glamorous, and that is on purpose. It is comfortable, like visiting a relative. It sits in a private nature reserve in the Hennops River Valley and for nearly fifty years this family-run hydro has practised what we call slow medicine: find the person before the disease becomes the identity; treat lifestyle as the foundation of health, not an afterthought; give the body water, rest, real food, genuine company, easy movement and enough quiet for the senses to breathe.
For some guests, a stay here is a launch pad into a different later life. They come after a scare, a retirement, a loss, a long stretch of putting everyone else first.
For others, Hoogland is a regular top-up. They already know how they want to age. They also know that a busy life erodes the very habits that make that possible. An annual retreat is not an escape from real life. It is how real life is kept inhabitable: a reset of inflammation and rhythm, a reminder of how the body feels when it is not hurried, a conversation with a doctor or a psychologist or a nutritionist who has time. Then they go home and live.
Neither use of the place is more respectable than the other. Beginnings and maintenance are both forms of growth. Spring does not happen only once.
Start Growing Young Today
You do not need a reserve in the Schurweberg Hills to begin. You need a slightly higher opinion of what is still possible, and a slightly lower opinion of rescue-as-love.
Spring is a season. It is also a decision. New growth can happen in a body, a mind, a set of books or a bank account that has already lived a long time. The question is not whether the sap is still there. The question is whether we will stop treating later life as a waiting room, and start treating it as ground that can still be planted.
“When I was a boy, the Dead Sea was only sick.” — George Burns