The Swedish way: Find the joy in everyday routines
Life expectancy in Sweden averages 81.9 years, making it the 13th most long-lived country on the planet. Author and artist Margareta Magnusson, 86, shares her secrets to living well into old age in her new book The Swedish Art Of Ageing Well, published by Canongate. In this extract she explains the Swedish habit of kart besvar.
There’s an idiom in Swedish – kart besvar – that I quite love. It sums up many of the important things we do in life. And as one ages, it seems more and more that everything becomes a kart besvar.
The words break down to kart, meaning “dear or cherished or beloved,” and besvar, meaning “pain or sorrow,” but it can also mean a burden or a nuisance. Paying your monthly bills might be considered a kart besvar: they are an annoying obligation, but you are grateful that you have the money to be able to pay and can feel good crossing them off your to-do list. Or a more heartfelt example might be looking after a sick loved one. Taking care of a sick person can be a burden, but being well enough to nurse them back to health is its own blessing, something to be cherished and something the sick person will also be thankful for, even if they never tell you.
The older I get, everything I do seems to be its own sort of burden – almost anything can now be physically or mentally difficult. There seems to be no other choice than to see each burden, every nuisance, every pain, as something that is also dear, something I must find a way to cherish. I apply my approach of kart besvar to my daily routines, to keep me sane and relatively healthy.
I read that the chair is our most dangerous invention – that more people die from unhealthy conditions exacerbated by sitting too much than by anything else. I don’t know if that is true, but I try not to sit too much. I prefer to stand or to move around as much as my walker allows. I’ve even found a way to make doing exercise fun; at around 9am every day I follow along with a short and light gymnastic programme on television. It is certainly kart besvar: sometimes I can’t believe my old body can move at all and it often aches. Yet I’m so grateful that I can at least – sort of – follow along. Too much free time on your hands? Strange new shortened sleep patterns where you wake long before sun up wondering if you actually slept at all? These are other perils of ageing. A daily battle.
The older one gets, the more one must find a way to make any routine a beloved routine, even if it is sometimes a pain. My newspaper arrives every morning, then perhaps I re-read books I’d forgotten I had on my bookshelves. Perhaps I imagine future hobbies I will take up. I use the phone a lot. I wash my clothes and my sheets and towels regularly. I keep my little apartment as tidy as possible; I am very happy my apartment is not bigger. None of these activities are extraordinary. Yet the secrets of ageing well and happily are in finding ways to make your routines dear to you.
I may not have a choice in how long they will take me to do or whether I will even be alive a few weeks from now, but I do have the choice to decide how to approach my daily life. Most days I’m able to see my daily routine, my daily life, as kart besvar.