“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.” Now, 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 experience, not a recycled or reimagined version of those years. I am sixty, and I’m not—at least I’m trying not to be—intimated 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. 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 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. 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, they are frighteningly weightless as they fly past, and when each year is gone, I wonder how it happened so quickly. 

In late summer, I took a train journey with my daughter who has reached her own “new thirty” this year – the real one. We marked our milestones together as the train raced down the tracks.

The metaphor is almost too easy. Our train speeds along the track, and we see vignettes of life as they flick by: a man leading a horse out of a paddock, birds rising from a marsh, an old truck traveling along a country road. These slide past so quickly, too quickly to take in each one, or have time to exclaim, “Did you see that?”

The wider landscape is slower-paced, easier to absorb: clouds in a blue sky, green mountains, a glassy lake. We enjoy it all, the wide vistas and the narrow moments as they fall behind and we speed along the track.

The week before my birthday, all three of our children (with help from their dad) surprised me by showing up from three different states. They rearranged their schedules and crossed the miles by car and plane for a weekend celebration of my sixth decade. Those sweet days flicked by all too quickly, but you can be sure I savored them as life kept speeding along.

Now I’m sixty. Can’t stop this train, so I’m taking in the broad vistas and savoring the small moments even when they pass much too quickly. I’m celebrating where I am.

We don’t have to convince ourselves that what we now are is the new-something-else to justify where we are in life. We are here. Every year, every decade is new when we get here. We don’t have to convince ourselves otherwise. This is where we belong for this moment.

This is my new sixty, and I’m celebrating it.

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