Photo from karam_veer, licensed on Creative Commons
A friend asked me recently how I felt about turning sixty this year.
“Terrible,” I replied.
“It’s just a number,” my friend said hopefully.
“Yes,” I said, “but it’s a very big number.”
The joke landed like a lead balloon. It’s been like that lately, my audience staring back at me, waiting to be entertained. Sometimes it is a look my teenaged daughter shoots me from across the room. Sometimes it is the feeling I get on social media, as if I am the one missing the joke. Lately, I feel like I am slightly out of tune with the culture, as if I have been unwittingly switched to a different frequency. To quote from a recently released song by The Cure, a band I first fell in love with forty years ago (and it hurts to say that), "I know, I know / That my world has grown old."
Yes, sixty hurts, and as often as I hear people say "sixty is the new forty," I know in my bone marrow that this is not true. Sixty is sixty. It carries with it unmistakable social connotations of aging. You cross a threshold at sixty and denying it or joking it away changes nothing.
But sixty is also a liberation---IF you are doing it right---from the prison of status consciousness and the stifling expectations of a society that expects us to always perform a fake, phony version of ourselves in public. Sixty is liberation from caring about the perversely youth-obsessed culture that has made us judge ourselves unfairly against its ridiculous expectations for decades. Freedom to say what we want, to finally untangle our authentic selves from our public personas. The freedom to not give a damn.
Not giving a damn is not itself a virtue---there are many sixtysomething rageaholics on social media who have made not giving a damn their life's mission---but it is sometimes a defense against the ludicrous social expectations that warped our lives when we were younger. I prefer to think of not giving a damn as a license to check out of the things that no longer matter to me, to finally organize my life around my own values and needs.
But for many of us, the great paradox of sixty is that the sheer momentum of our lives prevents us from too radically reorganizing our priorities. When we were in our twenties, self-centeredness was a more natural instinct---and we may have indulged it then---but decades of responsibility have left a permanent mark. Whether we intended it or not, the marriages and mortgages and child-rearing and dedication to work and career have made us less able to see ourselves as unitary beings who are behind the wheel of our own lives. Now we are aware of being carried along with others in this great current of life, and we feel the momentum propelling us forward to destinations that we perhaps did not choose for ourselves. Are we still capable of building little eddies around our self-interest and desires? Should we even try?
I find myself listening more. My ego is no longer clawing at me to fill the room with my presence. In his song “Highlands,” Bob Dylan sings: “The sun is beginning to shine on me /
But it's not like the sun that used to be / The party's over and there's less and less to say.” I didn’t understand this lyric in the late ‘90s when I first heard it, but I get it now. It’s a new sun, and I’m seeing the world in new colors and hues. I’m sloughing off some of the old ego, leaving behind the need to fill the room with my words and my presence. Maybe the party was our twentysomething selves and most of what came with it, good and bad, and yes, that party is over, but how much do we actually miss that person?
Some people my age have yet to realize where they are on the existential and societal measuring stick, and they rage against the dying of whatever light they believe still shines forward from their twenties. The youth-obsessed culture is always encouraging us to deny aging as if it is little more than an unfair stereotype, but I prefer to face sixty with eyes wide open rather than peering out from that eye tuck my optometrist recommended on my last visit, along with the names of a few good plastic surgeons.
I prefer to see myself as a new being altogether, living under that new sun Dylan speaks of, having been forged in the clarifying fire of suffering and loss and the abiding love that comes with marriage and fatherhood and the lessons learned from the uncountable mistakes I have made along the way, none of them yet fatal, thankfully. In my twenties and thirties, I was overflowing with expectations and goals, always ready to judge myself as less than something, always restless, always disappointed at myself for not having reached some plateau or other. Now I am certain that it is enough to have simply survived this long.
Is that a defeatist thing to say? Have I set my standards too low? Some will say "yes," but I am certain that I care far less about the judgements of others than I once did.
I care far less than I once did because sixty comes with a heightened awareness of mortality, my own certainly, but also the sense that everyone in my life is more fragile than I once thought. I have lost enough people to claim a grim familiarity with death, the friends and relatives and former lovers who have died from cancer, ALS, Alzheimer's, accident, and violence. The departed linger in my mind with a new intimacy. In my twenties, the dead appeared to have crossed into another dimension, inaccessible to me, but now they are tangled up in my memories, close to the surface, calling out to me.
They ground me in a clear-eyed sense of what matters most, and that is a gift.
Sixty is a big number, and open to interpretation, but to me it signifies the stubborn persistence to live on. What is left over after the ego has been repeatedly smashed against the rocks, after the most powerful illusions of our childhood have worn through? This is sixty, like the aftermath of a shipwreck, but the sun is shining and the beach is beautiful and after all, you have survived when others have not. Live on with gratitude, love, and joy. That is what I say.
Comments