Last weekend, my grand-aunt turned 100.

One hundred is an extraordinary number. It is difficult to really imagine what it means to have lived for an entire century, to have seen the world change over that amount of time, and to have accumulated that many years of experiences, encounters and stories.

We visited her for lunch to celebrate, and while sitting there with her, I thought less of the number of her age itself than of the person sitting across from me and what she radiated. What immediately struck me was how clear and quick she is, following everything that is being said, asking questions, making jokes and responding with a wonderfully cheeky sense of humour. She asked about my work, wanted to know what exactly I do, how it is going and, most importantly, whether I enjoy it. She told me how important that is to her. Life is too short not to find joy in your work - there is something quite wonderful about hearing the words “life is too short” from someone on her hundredth birthday.

Throughout lunch, I kept noticing how interested she is in the world around her. She wanted to know what was happening in our lives. We talked about real estate and how the market is developing, about investments, fashion and jewellery, and about changing trends. She wasn't removed from the conversation, looking at the present from a distance or dwelling on the past. She was right in the middle of it, interested in what comes next.

Just a few days before her birthday, she had returned from a ten-day road trip through northern Italy with two of her grandchildren. They travelled to a different city every couple of days and even went to Venice.

She isn't superhumanly fit. She has a hearing aid, uses a cane and a walker, and for longer trips even a wheelchair. But it was astounding how little these things seemed to define what she does. There was no great story about overcoming her age or ignoring her limitations and no whining about how difficult the trip was. Instead, the emphasis was on the incredible experience she had with her grandchildren and how much they all enjoyed and benefited from travelling together.

And so she went to Venice.

Perhaps that is one of the things that moved me most: participation does not require the absence of limitations. It is something I think about often in relation to movement and the body. We can become very focused on getting rid of every difficulty before we allow ourselves to do things again. But adaptation itself is a skill: finding ways of working with what you have so that we can continue doing the things that matter to us. Rather than making life smaller, it can be precisely what allows life to remain large.

My grand-aunt ran her own cinema until she was 91. She went skiing until she was 80 — and only stopped because she had an accident. Her independence, however, goes back much further than that.

When she was young, she was engaged to be married. Five weeks before the wedding, her fiancé told her that once they were married, she would no longer be able to run her cinema. Her place would be at home. He was a hunter, and she would need to learn how to prepare and cook what he brought home. He promised her a great kitchen.

She left him.

This story means a lot to me, not only because of how unimaginable that proposed life must have seemed to her, but because it tells me something about a quality I still see in her today: she knows her own mind and has a strong sense of self. That shows up in very ordinary things, too, like what she likes to wear, what tastes good to her or when she has eaten enough. She told me that she doesn't eat much meat, perhaps once a week, and that generally she doesn't eat very much anymore because she simply doesn't need as much now that she is older. These are small things, but there is a clarity to them. She seems to listen to herself and I really resonate with that.

After our lunch, my mind kept returning to four things I had observed: curiosity, agency, participation and joy. Not as an explanation for why she has reached 100, and not as lessons to extract from one person's hundred years and turn into instructions for everybody else. They were simply the qualities that left an impression on me and that seemed so special about her.

These qualities are what I constantly try to include in my work, in my workshops, private sessions, as well as when encountering art and I believe they are so beneficial in ones own daily life, however long it lasts.

To remain curious.

To retain agency over my own life and my own body.

To find ways to participate.

And to keep finding joy.