“And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back — if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?”
~ C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
The year I turned fifty, plenty of people tried to reassure me – and possibly themselves – with the mantra that “fifty is the new thirty.” A decade later, the latest iteration of the mantra is trying to convince me that “sixty is the new forty.”
I’ve been thirty and forty. I’ve been fifty. They were all good. Very good, but this is none of those things. Sixty is definitely a new era, not a recycled or reimagined version of past years. I am sixty, and I’m not—at least I’m trying not to be—intimidated by the number.
It’s easy to believe one decade’s birthday is just a new version of another. Easy, because at forty or fifty, and even now, in some ways I still feel the same as when I was thirty. I did say in some ways.
I won’t lie. I often want to think of myself as younger than my years. But I’m not. All those years, while making an impression on my physical self, have also deepened my experience and my appreciation of life, even of my older self.
My daughter was born when I was thirty, and it was a very good year. A hard year in some ways, but a good one. We were overseas in a tough military assignment, far from home. I had a toddler and a new baby, and sometimes I wondered what happened to the twenty-year-old me; and I still wonder sometimes.
Anyone who reaches any milestone beyond thirty will tell you it’s hard to comprehend the number of years as they go by. When I was young, I thought the years would make me feel old, that they would weigh heavily, but they don’t. Instead, the years are frighteningly weightless as they slip by, and when each season is done, I wonder how it is over so quickly.
In late summer, I took a train journey with my daughter who reached her own “new thirty” this year – the real one. We marked our milestones together as the train raced down the track.
The metaphor is almost too easy. Our train surges forward, and we see vignettes of life as they flick by: a man leading a horse out of a paddock, egrets rising from a marsh, an old truck on a country road that twists away into the distance. These brief images slide past too quickly for photos, blurring, running together as we leave them behind. I scrawl brief descriptions in my journal, hoping to hold on to the images — the memories.
The wider landscape goes by at a slower pace, so it’s easier to absorb: clouds in a blue sky, green mountains, a glassy lake. We try to take it all in, the wide vistas and the narrow moments as they fall behind and we speed along the track.
Back at home — and a few months later — all three of our children (with help from their dad) surprised me by showing up from three different states for an early birthday surprise. They rearranged their schedules and crossed the miles by car and plane for a weekend celebration. Every moment of those sweet days flicked by much too quickly, but I am still thinking about them as life clickety-clacks along, carrying me forward.
And now I’m sixty. Can’t stop this train, so I’m taking in the broad vistas and trying to capture the small glimpses, even when they pass much too quickly. I am celebrating where I am.
I don’t need to justify my age by convincing myself that what I am is the new something-else-I-already-was. Every past experience is still a part of who I am, and every year, every decade is new when I get here. This is where I belong for the moment.
And for now, I’m the new sixty.
Terri Barnes is a writer, book editor, and book lover. She is the author of Spouse Calls: Messages from a Military Life.