This is Part 2 of a two-part series - I’d recommend you read Part 1 first.
Simon, the co-owner of my cafe, has just brought me another long black and pointed out the excellent crema on top. I’m surrounded by chatter as I plug away on my MacBook. Next to me are three mums, yakking about school, their kids, and the awfulness of parent WhatsApp groups. One exclaims she’s now delegated the WhatsApp to her husband; she doesn’t want to get involved in the endless nitpicking and micromanagement some of the others expect in the chat.
I’m trying to hide a smile of self-satisfaction at the Mum-chatter; I’ve left school behind with my youngest finishing a couple of years ago. But I’m loving how they’ve taken the time to come together, share coffee and food, and natter about their parenting challenges - one of them has a husband who works in the mines somewhere as an electrician and is away for a couple of weeks at a time, leaving her to manage the kids and the home.
It’s midmorning and the ‘brunch’ crowd is intermingled with groups of workers from the level crossing removal project nearby, in their big boots and fluro workwear. I am solitary, but not lonely. This is solitude I have chosen; I often write better with the white noise buzzing around me than sitting in my quiet house. The noise triggers memories, thoughts, reflections and feeds my words as they spill onto the keyboard. As I type, I’m looking back, not litigating, rather more dispassionately examining a bunch of moments in my life as I look for the language to describe my life after six decades.
It’s my 60th birthday this Sunday, 23 August 2026. In Part One of this two-part series, I wrote about a range of emotions through my life: shame, dismay, regrets. Looking back over more than five years of Alone Rangers, I can see anger and shame surfacing repeatedly. Yet most pieces move, however imperfectly, towards equanimity. Writing has rarely resolved an emotion completely, but it has helped me understand what I was carrying. I have tried to be honest in everything I write, although I still self-censor sometimes, cautious about exposing all aspects of a situation or moment in my life.
I promised in my previous article that this series was not going to be all doom and gloom, because my life so definitely is not, even if I have had, and continue occasionally to have, low moments. I doubt anyone is happy 100% of the time, but I do have a great deal of joy in my life. I am also sure I am not alone, that moments that once felt like crises are now just great after-dinner stories.
I’ve written a great deal about, and around, loneliness over the years, because this was my starting point. There is an escape from loneliness, but until you give that emotion better lighting, hold it up for inspection, you’re unlikely to see the path through. I started turning the light on at 54.
My life today is so different to 50 or 54. Half the month I am alone at home; the two eldest kids are launched and living their own lives, with their own careers, partners and interests. My youngest is with me half the time, leaving me bounding around my three-bedroom house every other week. It’s a curious existence, living solo. I’ve not lived by myself since leaving home back in the 80s. I’ve always shared a home, whether with housemates or partners.
As a family of five under one roof for many years, life was dominated by all the usual practicalities - schools, sport, shopping, housework - combined with running our own businesses. That’s not to say I was lonely; looking back, I definitely was, but I had an ersatz sense of people in my life beyond my family through socialising with other parents and working with small teams in the businesses.
Sitting in solitude in my cafe today is not the same; in a household of five, solitude is rarely achievable, rather loneliness creeps up on you as you go through the routine of domesticity.
Let’s look at the evidence. Start with the physical. Six years ago, I had a number 1 all-over buzz cut. I’d never worn nail polish. I was a clean slate - no tattoos. Today I have long hair, held up in a ponytail. My nails are painted purple (my favourite colour), although they’re often black. I have multiple visible tattoos; the largest is a phoenix covering my entire lower right arm, a symbol of new beginnings. On my other forearm is tattooed the words Kindness Respect Love - three words that underpin how I feel about life. Both of these tattoos are, in a fashion, a promise to myself, a reminder in front of me every day about what’s important.
At 54 I failed the pub test; I didn’t have three friends I could call to ask if they’d like a beer. Today there’s 60+ people on my birthday party invitation list; I’m punting maybe 50 or so to turn up.
I have learnt to decouple my self-worth from output; given my semi-retirement, I do have days where I am not sure what I am going to do - that’s a new feeling; I’m so conditioned to be busy that having nothing to do still takes some processing. I still do some consulting with the company I helped build. It keeps me connected to its future without requiring it to consume my identity as it once did.
Money is still a stress. I do live a pretty quiet life; I have no expensive ambitions, although a recent message from a Melbourne friend travelling through Europe and about to arrive in Berlin did make me a little sad that I couldn’t commit to an impromptu plane ride to meet her there. The car needs a fairly expensive repair, but I’ve got a workaround that should hold things together for a while longer. I have enough for a quiet life, but not enough to feel entirely free.
Part One allowed me the indulgence to wallow a little in how directionless I was earlier in my life. The idea of settling into a long-term career, building financial stability, seemed unimportant, even if I had thought about it at all - which I’m pretty confident I didn’t. Perhaps I regret not being in a better financial position today. But it is what it is.
I’ve learnt so much from my children. When our eldest daughter was born, I don’t think I’d ever held a baby. We’re a very narrow family tree; I don’t have any cousins, and our daughter was the first child in my sibling generation. Today she’s 29, lives on the Gold Coast with her partner, and has an amazing career. I’m in awe of her resilience, independence, and care for her partner and friends. Her brother is 25, lives up the road from me, works for the government, and has put his hand up as a candidate in the forthcoming state election. I’m so proud of the young man he has grown into. My youngest just turned 20; she is intellectually disabled, she can’t read or write, and has poor communication skills, yet shows great artistic talent which is being enthusiastically nurtured by a number of amazing people, and one of her paintings has just been selected to hang in Parliament House in Canberra.
I joke sometimes that having a child who will turn 30 next year is making me feel old. But really, I mean I live in amazement at everything all three have achieved, how each has become their own version of a good human, having strong friendships - some stretching back to primary school. There’s a twinge of jealousy on my part; I wish I had that, but that’s overshadowed by my joy at seeing them embrace adulthood and life with verve and independence.
I’ve pondered happiness a great deal, including in my writing. For a very long time, I thought unhappiness was a consequence of others in my life. Today I know it is my responsibility. Your partners and friends are not the source of your happiness, but they can trigger it. The rest is up to you. And possessions, money and titles mean nothing. I’ve known unhappy rich people and happy poor people.
What of my life today? Am I a fully resolved human? Goodness no. But we’re getting there.
I was lost after my 23-year relationship ended. Blame was easy to ascribe, harder to own. It was a profoundly challenging experience; our cultural imprinting tells us that this is a failure of your life, and it leads to feelings of isolation and loneliness. You question your self-worth. It doesn’t really matter ‘whose fault’ it was. Many relationships run their course. Decades ago, a couple probably would stay together because ‘that’s what you do’, and they both would be unhappy indefinitely. Relationship breakdown is now common enough that few families remain untouched by it.
I had two breakthrough, life-altering moments. I sat down and wrote about my loneliness. It was an impulse that I still cannot source, but clearly a synapse in my brain connected and fired. I am deeply grateful. Secondly, I started therapy with someone who didn’t take my shit shallow responses as legitimate, forced me to dive deeply into my emotions, and kept me accountable week after week.
I learnt to label my emotions, take a step back, and examine them to understand what was surfacing them. I learnt that negative emotions like shame and anger have root causes, and that they are part of being human. I learnt to accept them and seek out their counterparts: joy and love. This is not to say I am a sea of tranquillity today - you should see me in the car and the expletives at other drivers for their rubbish driving!
Six years ago I had almost no friendships in which I felt fully known. Today I have dozens, of all shapes, sizes, types and colours. A rainbow of a constellation. With ending full-time work, that constellation has largely replaced my professional network of tenuous connections and semi-friendships. Is connection at 60 actually different? Probably not; it’s just better lit, more examined, more purposeful. I socialise regularly. I volunteer at events around town that attract people from all walks of life, giving me an invaluable lesson that ‘normal’ is whatever you decide, not the chattering of commentators or society.
I mentioned earlier my Kindness Respect Love tattoo; I intended to add the word Joy at some stage, when I felt I had earned it. That morphed on a Bali trip last year to ink the first small part of what I hope will be a large tattoo; the first piece is a cluster of frangipani flowers, a reminder of tropical childhood in Darwin. Frangipani, bougainvillea and other images are symbols of joy to me.
I have a small coterie of people I am extremely close to, who hold me up when I am down and who, in return, know they can call me at any time for anything. They have reminded me that our capacity for love may be infinite, but trust and closeness are built through what we repeatedly do. It’s led to more complex relationships than I could ever have envisaged, but gives me much joy. Friendship and human connection are everything. There’s an Alexis Jordan song ‘Happiness’ with the chorus lyric ‘In time, I found myself in happiness with you’; I love that idea.
What does the next 10 years hold?
2026 has been a year of flux, with some shifting sands and uncertainty. I do not know what the next ten years will ask of me. I hope for a simpler, more creative life, one shaped by purpose, connection and contentment. Above all, I want to keep growing the joy in my life, and to earn whatever comes next in that unfinished tattoo.
Read Part One:
David, I love your tattoo post. When I turned 50 and stepped ‘down’ (actually up) from an administrative job, I promised myself that I would put a tatoo on my arm that represented my life. It took 5 years of thinking to design it. I came up with open hands; one above and three below. The one above sometimes has been me; The ones below sometimes have included me. But fundamentally they have meant that I have known joy and love and connectedness by always being open to people and experiences outside of me.