Why I’m Happy to Be Sixty and Not Counting

The passage of time lets you grow

Grace Mary Power, May 2024. Photo provided by the author.

When you’re happy with your life, you’re healthier and more productive. And happiness comes from having our needs met, looking after yourself and your loved ones, choosing to focus on the positives in things, and having a purpose in life.

In September 2023 I turned sixty. Before I reached this milestone I didn’t have time to worry over turning sixty. In fact, my upcoming birthday reflecting six decades was something for me to look forward to. I had made it to age sixty!

A month before my 60th birthday I felt a sudden twinge of shock at the thought of myself about to turn sixty. But it was short-lived because I realized that I was responding to the stereotyped perspective of 60 being old.

When I was a teenager I couldn’t wait to be thirty-five. There were many people in my life at that time. And I viewed those aged between 30 to 35 as being happy and successful. I looked up to them. Back then turning fifty was a far-away prospect and I thought that at 50 I would be old. When you are 17 years old, more than twice that age seems ancient, but it turns out that it isn’t.

Now that I have gone past fifty and am sixty, I can pat myself on the back for a life well lived. I have made it through three major health events, including Open Heart Surgery in 2014 to replace my aortic valve with a mechanical valve.

I have been in the workforce for nearly forty years, straddling six different organisations. My childhood influenced me to study a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Biology. Because I love to understand, support and uplift others I completed a Post-graduate Diploma in Social Research and Evaluation and participated in a huge range of volunteer work.

My life has been full and intense with more challenges than I can count, as Australia’s oldest inter-country adopted person, born in the sixties. Yet I don’t regret what happened to me because I have learned how truly responsible I am for my life.

I have made it through untold hardships, coming out the other side as a peaceful, respectful, kind and supportive human being. I am wise now to what makes the world go around.

For me, I feel that the best is yet to come!

What if we get more experienced with time rather than older?

Every human being goes through experiences and because they are events over “time”, as we pass through the passage of time we accumulate more experiences.

As a Biologist I understand that living things change their matter form in terms of metabolism (internal processes) slowing down with use of the body over the years. Think about the general wear and tear of a mechanical object, reducing its capacity for work over time. However, a certain passing of time does not guarantee that a particular decline in function will happen.

Dan Buettner spoke to 263 people aged over 100 years old about their secrets of living long lives. He found they had the following non-negotiables.

1. Move naturally: Walk and garden or stay fit while growing and preparing your own food and getting about.
2. Purpose: Have a sound reason for getting out of bed every day above making your needs met.
3. Manage stress: Downshift your life or remove influences of stress where possible. If you have unavoidable stressful elements in your life, consciously acknowledge and manage them toward minimal stress.
4. Conscious eating: Stop eating when your stomach feels 80% full. It takes 20 minutes after eating to feel satiated or 100% full. This stops you from over-eating. Eat local pesticide-free whole fruit and vegetables as well as nuts and beans and be sparing with eating meat and consuming added sugar.
5. Belonging: Have faith in a greater power.
6. Put loved ones first: Take good care of yourself and your family and loved ones. Don’t stress over concerns about others because you can’t be responsible for everyone at once. Do what you can. Trust your loved ones and let their love for you drive your courage.
7. Find your tribe: Find social circles that support healthy behaviors.

Consider time as a resource whereby you can discover, implement and refine these seven strategies for longevity, i.e. a long life.

Every person has a catalogue of experiences as time passes. People who have chronologically lived for longer have refined their perspectives, tweaked lessons from their experiences and shared wisdom from their catalogues. What they have learned can help people to age gracefully and to live more satisfactorily.

Photo by Ravi Patel on Unsplash

I motivated myself to find and use the keys to longevity

People who have been through challenges and trauma tend to lack self-belief and withdraw from life. This happened to me, but my spirituality or sense of belonging to a greater power helped me to start consciously managing myself.

Feeling at my core that I am here for good reasons helps me to take one day at a time. I have a strong purpose in life and that is to care for the Earth and to support and uplift people, to the best of my ability.

It took me a while to find my “tribe” or a close circle of positive friends because for a long time I pushed people away. But as I learned that stress is the greatest obstacle to good mental, emotional, and physical health, I studied ways to overcome negative thinking and unhelpful emotions, like fear and anger. Stress can be caused by a negative mindset and by draining emotions associated with unhelpful thoughts.

Over time I graced myself with the motivation and will-power to become conscious of the origins of my limiting beliefs and to dissect and re-frame them. I chose to understand that I wasn’t a bad person and this paved the way for me to open myself up to others with similiar values and interests.

I started to pay attention to what I was eating and ate better. In 2023, the year that I turned 60, I formulated an exercise plan for myself. The literature states that it is never too late to start exercising. And my physical movement and diet before this had been good, but could be better. So I chose to improve them.

Why self-love matters

I am grateful and glad that I had four decades from when I was ten years old to learn to love myself in order to then put my loved ones first. When you reject looking after yourself you are not fully trained in caring for your loved ones. Self-love matters. It is the bedrock of all healthy relationships.

In my late fifties my self-awareness and self-management sky-rocketed. At the age of sixty I find myself on the fast-track to living the enlightenment that 60 years of living has given me.

It has taken 50 years for me to wrestle with and overcome my shadows and to find a healing groove through modalities like self-reflection, energy medicine, Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), crystal energy, and the Emotion Code.

Self-love is a superpower that gives you clarity, energy, and motivation to care for yourself and others.

Time does not rush anything when you are evolving or learning from your experiences. You should give yourself all the time in the world to become all that you can be. Over time you take the steps to delve into who you really are.

It’s not a given that as we get older we get wiser. But we do accumulate more years of lived experiences. And these experiences can be transformed into wisdom if we learn from them.

The steps that got me here today. Created by Grace Mary Power.

Make your years last

As we age we tend to worry about physically being restricted to doing less than we used to do. I have less energy now than ten years ago, but I can choose to exercise, eat well, have a purpose, and connect with others to maintain a positive outlook. And I don’t want to run a marathon or play competitive sports requiring a lot of energy. If I did I would have taken steps toward that and have done it by now.

Rather than focus upon bodily changes as time passes, why not think about the impact you have had on the world? Through my one-to-one support, my writing, personal contact, workforce experiences, volunteer work, and daily living I have made an impact.

As the clock ticks there are immeasurable incidences in your life which have a ripple effect. I’m sure that when a person looks back at their life, she or he will see acts of kindness that she/he actively made which lit up or made somebody’s day.

What if older people choose to have satisfaction from these light-bulb moments rather than ponder upon getting more frail or not having the energy to go abseiling or do some other vigorous physical activity?

Stop counting the years

There’s no need to count down the years until you turn 60 or 70 or 80 or older if you are looking after yourself to the best of your ability, accept help from others where it is needed, and have a sense of purpose, a faith, a group to belong to, a strategy for self-care, and realization of your limitations.

Ageing is in the eye of the beholder. You can age or travel the years, learning from the past to co-create the future, while living in the present. And this requires being comfortable with your age by knowing that time is a marker of experiences lived.

On the day that I said to myself, “I am 60 years old” I asked myself, “what does that mean?” It means that I have lived for sixty years, that’s all. 60 is a number. It is not essentially linked to a definite degree of deterioration.

The passage of time lets you grow

I see getting older as the getting of wisdom if you let this unfold. And I see no value in worrying about or being scared of ill-health or losing my faculties. I have the resources to care for my body to avoid illnesses and will take the steps that I can take to keep mentally well.

The latest scientific research suggests ageing isn’t a straightforward decline and that life peaks later than you might think. People develop a greater perspective of what’s important as the years pass. And the ability to problem-solve is streamlined after years of practice.

There’s also an accumulation of knowledge that is called crystallized intelligence. Crystallized intelligence involves knowledge that comes from prior learning and past experiences.

Getting older is inevitable so why not do it as positively as possible, and be satisfied or happy with your accumulated wisdom and with what you’ve got to be thankful for? This is what I choose.

Today I choose my “roaring sixties!”

Having good things in my life, being willing to learn, having positivity and a healthy approach toward ageing is why I am happy to be 60 and not counting. I invite you to treat the passage of time in this way too.