Reflections On: Turning 60 and the Elixir of Youth

Big Birthdays have always been a bit of a facer, but I used to have the comfort of knowing that I was still effectively youngish with a lot of my life hopefully still ahead of me. Sadly this line of argument doesn’t quite hold water as the clock ticks past 60: from one day to the next, I seemingly fell off the edge of a cliff, hurtling down into the abyss of older age. Saggyness appeared overnight as skin and muscle withered in unison, with aches and pains arriving as uninvited guests to the party and seeming reluctant to leave. Don’t you just hate the over-stayers?! Never has ‘beauty sleep’ been more essential - and never has it been harder to recover from a big night out! With physical deterioration seems to come mental deterioration, also apparently overnight: suddenly forgetting words and doing a lot of ‘whatshisname’-ing or ‘thingymajig’-ing or simply staring into space as I’ve forgotten what I’m going to say next. Now I know none of this is unusual - the only unusual bit was its sudden onset from 59 to 60 as the unwanted birthday gift!

But before you reach for your shot gun, let’s take a look at some of the positives in the grisly business of ageing. First, surely, comes ‘Aren’t I lucky?’. To reach the age of 60 is already the greatest gift. Many don’t. So we must be truly thankful rather than weeping and wailing. And with age comes wisdom. Or so it should. If you’re none the wiser now than when were you were born then I fear you’ve missed the point of living! ‘Every day’s a school day’ so the saying goes - and that’s just as it should be. There’s a lesson to be learnt in every day that passes, even if it’s not much more than finally understanding what ‘what3words’ is all about or how to silicone round a bath! By 60 you’ve been around the block a bit. Not a lot surprises you any more apart from the fact that the politicians get younger by the second - and how can such whippper-snappers possibly govern the country? Well, clearly they can’t…but that’s another conversation!

By the age of 60 you will have lived approximately 31,536,000 minutes on Planet Earth. Don’t even ask me to calculate how many heart beats that it, but it’s a lot. So send your heart a lot of love and be grateful. It’s also a lot of minutes of smiling, laughing, crying, eating, drinking, running, swimming, gardening, walking, sleeping, working, reading - and learning. So on that basis the older generation should be worth listening to, I like to hope. Not everything we say is necessarily outdated and stupid and increasingly I hear important people saying stuff and I think WHAT?! And then you realise that they’re quite young so they didn’t experience such and such or live through such and such or have even heard of such and such…hence the grumpy old man/woman syndrome begins and once it gathers momentum it can be hard to stop!

Yet with all things in life there is a balance to be achieved. The younger generations can surely learn from the older ones (including from their mistakes) - and it works the other way round too. The most important thing is to keep an open mind, be open to new viewpoints, be open to new ideas and customs and inventions - and keep learning and adapting. We shouldn’t become too stuck in our ways, losing flexibility of thought even as we are losing flexibility of body. Some of the ‘youngest’ old people I know are those who keep open-minded to new ideas, who love talking to young people, who are always open to new experiences. Shed light on the past for the young, and they will shed light on the present and future for us. It is what I like to think of as another branch of the holistic approach to living: don’t get stuck in a rut with blinkers on. No, go out and embrace all aspects of life for as long as you possibly can. Living is learning, and learning is living. That’s our reason to get up in the morning - young or old, creaking or not creaking! And on that note, I think I may have just found the formula to the Elixir of Youth! Indeed, in the wise words of poet and wordsmith, Donna Ashworth, ‘Don’t change the way you look my friend, change the way you see.’