I watched the final episode of 70 Up last night and found it difficult to shake off. I found it poignant, sad, uplifting and, perhaps most of all, confusing. That last word matters because I don’t think this extraordinary series left me with a neat conclusion about life, and perhaps that is precisely its achievement. For more than six decades we have watched the same people grow from seven-year-old children into adults and now into their seventies.
We have seen ambitions expressed with the beautiful certainty of childhood encounter the much less predictable reality of actually living. Careers have happened, relationships have flourished and failed, families have grown, people have experienced loss, health has changed, expectations have been revised and life has repeatedly refused to follow the script. Watching the final instalment, I found myself thinking again and again about Find Joy in the Middle, because if there was ever a demonstration that the richness of life happens between beginnings and endings, surely this was it.
The original 7 Up was interested in a compelling question: how much of the adult can already be seen in the child? It looked particularly at the effects of class, background and opportunity. Yet, watching those lives from the vantage point of 70, I was struck by how inadequate any simple idea of prediction eventually becomes. Certainly, our beginnings matter. Where we come from, the opportunities available to us and the expectations placed upon us all shape what follows. But they do not tell the whole story. Life intervenes. People surprise us and we surprise ourselves. Things we desperately want do not happen, while other things we could never have imagined become enormously important. Doors close and unexpected ones open. We adapt, compromise, recover, change our minds and sometimes discover that something we once regarded as a disappointment looks very different when viewed from further down the road.
That is one of the things I have tried to explore through Find Joy in the Middle. We are very attracted to beginnings. New jobs, new relationships, new projects, new homes and new years all come beautifully uncluttered by what follows. At the beginning, possibility is everywhere and disappointment has not yet had time to interfere. We are equally fascinated by endings, because endings allow us to construct a story about what happened. Retirement speeches, obituaries, anniversaries and biographies take the untidiness of decades and arrange it into something that appears coherent. What we talk about much less is the enormous space between the two, where most of life actually happens. The middle is where plans meet reality, where certainty becomes doubt, where achievements coexist with disappointments and where we discover that life is much harder to classify as successful or unsuccessful than we once imagined.
There was something almost unnerving about seeing the participants confronted by their younger selves. Most of us are spared the experience of watching our seven, 14, 21 or 28-year-old selves describing confidently what we expect from the future. Yet those earlier versions of us still exist somewhere. I can certainly look backwards and remember times when I thought I knew where my own life was going. There were ambitions I thought would matter enormously, worries that occupied far too much space and assumptions about the future that turned out to be completely wrong. There are also people, experiences and opportunities that became hugely important to me which I could never have predicted. Perhaps one of the gifts of getting older is slowly becoming more forgiving of the person we used to be. They were making choices without knowing what we know now. What looks obvious in retrospect was rarely obvious at the time.
And that was where the sadness of 70 Up sat for me alongside something unexpectedly uplifting. Time is impossible to ignore in the programme. We see what six decades do. People who were once present are no longer there, possibilities have disappeared, relationships have changed and some chapters are definitively over. There is genuine loss in that. Yet the lives we are watching stubbornly refuse to become simple stories of triumph or failure. A life can contain achievement and regret, contentment and disappointment, love and loss without one cancelling out the other. Someone can arrive somewhere very different from where their seven-year-old self expected and still have lived a life of enormous value. There is something wonderfully liberating about that.
Perhaps we spend too much of our lives waiting for the moment when everything will finally make sense. We tell ourselves that things will settle down when this busy period is over, when the project is finished, when work becomes easier, when we have enough money, when the family is sorted, when we achieve the thing we have been working towards. Somewhere ahead of us exists an imaginary point at which the pieces will fall into place and we will finally understand what it has all been about. Then, presumably, we can relax and enjoy ourselves. Yet watching people at 70 reflecting upon lives we have witnessed in fragments since childhood made me wonder whether that moment ever really arrives. Perhaps life remains unfinished and contradictory for as long as we are living it.
That thought could sound bleak, but I find it strangely hopeful. What if we do not have to wait for resolution before we allow ourselves joy? What if something does not have to turn out as we hoped for it to have been worthwhile? What if we do not yet have to decide whether a particular period of our life was a success or failure? We might simply acknowledge that it happened, that it changed us, and that we carried on. Finding joy in the middle has never meant pretending that difficult things are wonderful or encouraging a relentless positivity that refuses to acknowledge disappointment. For me, it is almost the opposite. It is about recognising that joy can exist alongside uncertainty, sadness, frustration and regret. We do not have to eliminate one before we are entitled to experience the other.
That may be why 70 Up left me feeling so many apparently contradictory things at once. It was poignant because we knew we were saying goodbye. It was sad because time, ageing and loss were impossible to avoid. It was uplifting because people keep finding meaning, relationships, interests, humour and reasons to look forward. And it was confusing because there was no great answer waiting at the end. Nobody stepped forward to explain what makes a successful life or reveal the secret of happiness. There was simply the accumulated evidence of people having lived, with all the glorious mess that involves.
Perhaps that is the lesson I am taking from it. There is no final edit while we are living. We do not get to tidy the story before experiencing it. We are always somewhere between what has happened and what might happen next, carrying previous versions of ourselves while becoming somebody slightly different. That middle can sometimes feel frustrating because we want to know how the story turns out. Increasingly, though, I think there is a freedom in accepting that we don’t need to know.
Finding joy in the middle is not about reaching a point where everything has worked out. It is about looking around while the story is still unfinished and noticing what is already here. It is forgiving ourselves for choices made without the benefit of hindsight, accepting that some questions may remain unanswered, valuing the people who are travelling alongside us and staying curious about what might still happen. 70 Up reminded me that a life does not need to have followed the plan to have been a good one. Perhaps the real challenge, whatever our age, is to resist waiting for the final chapter before deciding that the story we are living now is worthy of our attention.
Because we are not waiting for life to happen. We are already in the middle of it.
