Dear Jessica Brennan,
Yesterday I turned 60. The words sound surreal. Now before you say that you’re only as old as you feel and all those other annoying platitudes, I know. And I don’t feel the 60 of my mother or grandmother, and I don’t buy into the 60 that they bought into, yet here I am still 60.
Honestly, I would like to say it feels exhilarating, but mostly it feels obscene. I’m happy to have made it here because so many don’t, but it has stopped me in my tracks like no number that came before. 60… like minutes in an hour, seconds in a minute, and the maximum number of marbles in a Chinese Checkers game.
I admit I’ve had an enviable life to date. I have fantastic friends, a wonderful family and have met more than my share of enormously talented people from a hearty spectrum of the planet, but 60? I have so much more to do, and even if I have the fortune of living until I’m 85, that means I have only got about 9000 days to get it all done; about 1300 weeks. So I’ll need to get cracking. Can you buy a 25-year week-at-a-glance planner? I’ll check Amazon.
When my grandfather was 60, he sat in a chair all day and watched “The Price is Right” and “The Lawrence Welk Show” for about twenty years. Occasionally he would come over to our house to paint some trim, and we would be told to be very quiet because he was old.
Is it that easy? Do you think that will work on Dad? “Be quiet. I’m old”.
Truthfully, I preferred being 40 and have just pretended to be that age for the last 20 years, so likely, I will continue to do that for the next 1300 weeks. Why mess with something that’s working? Before 40, I was 28 for a full twelve years. Prior to that, I was 15 from birth.
I’m not sure what I should do now that the big day has arrived if I’m honest? Go grey? Get a perm? Maybe drink vodka out of the bottle, wear rubber boots and floppy hats and shout at the kids that step on my lawn? I could get ten cats, maybe. I’ve been threatening all this for years. “When I’m old, I’m going to…” Somehow once you get closer to old, it isn’t quite as appealing as it was as a cheeky thirty-year-old.
People have told me that by 40, you’re more confident, by 50, you just don’t care what people think, and by 60, you really have abandoned all thought of giving a sh*t, but that hasn’t been true for me. I still very much care, right or wrong. I’m a slow learner, though and always have been.
Turning 60 for me has been unbelievable. I have more energy now than I had when I was 45, 55, and yes, some of that is because the shackles of youth have fallen away, but I would be lying if I said that I’m not grieving the loss to some degree. I think that’s normal.
We often hear, “Live like every day could be your last.” Still, I’m not sure that’s healthy at this age, it can be too stressful to think in those terms. I’ve lived long enough to witness more than once, what that last day looks like.
So I’ve decided that I’m giving myself a new mantra for my 60th birthday as a gift. Maybe, you might want to adopt it before you’re 60. It goes like this.
“Live like every day could be your first”.
Love,
Mum xo
