SIXTY IS THE NEW FORTY
I confess when I was in my
thirties I thought of people in their
sixties as old! I thought at sixty
you needed help crossing the
street, hung out at Bingo Halls and
worried whether the soft lolly you
were offered would stick to your
dentures.
Well here I am turning sixty and
happily it looks nothing like I once
thought!
Even though we live in a youth-
obsessed society, and older people can
be considered irrelevant, I find nothing
shameful in saying my age.
Getting older does come with its own
challenges, emotionally, physically and
spiritually, but it’s our mindset that will
make the difference between feeling
forty and feeling sixty. After all you can
celebrate the fact that with age comes
wisdom and experience, you have fewer
insecurities, and a better understanding
of oneself, you stop sweating the small
stuff and gain an appreciation of your
own mortality.
As we get older we can choose to
use this as an excuse to become lazy, or
we can fight even harder to stay in good
shape, by using the same principles
we used when we were younger as a
foundation to carry us through as we
age.
Rather than looking forward to
retiring I have amped up my scale
of ambition. We tend to think of our
teenage and early adult years as those
of learning and skill building, and they
are, but so is now. A few years ago I
wrote my first novel Soft Underbelly and
it whilst it was scary in the beginning
I persevered and what a few years
earlier seemed inconceivable to me was
realised when I finally wrote ‘The End.’
On a spiritual level, at 60 I have
become aware of gratitude at a much
higher level, where once I was a glass
half empty kind of girl, I now see the
glass as half full. I consider this alone
to be one of the biggest advantages to
aging. In my forties I saw life in Sepia,
almost going through the motions
without stopping to smell the roses,
whereas now I see life in full spectrum
colour.
So, is sixty really the new forty?
For yours truly I say yes, but I plan to
embrace my sixties with open arms and
I am so excited to make it the very best
decade of my life.
Kat Powell
Winter 2019 69