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Good Morning,

When I was six, my grandfather was sixty. He was very old to me. Like Gandalf, or Yoda. It seemed impossible I would ever be that old. I remember that I played a time travel game, vowing that if I got to sixty, I would picture my six-year-old self, trying to imagine being sixty. When I actually reached sixty, last month, I honoured the vow and travelled back in time and memory to that 6-year-old boy, imagining the impossibility of being old. In doing this I felt a giddy mix of gratitude for the life lived, and alarm for the speed at which it was passing.

According to a new study, the age at which we are considered old has moved upwards. It’s natural that people don’t want to be thought as old as those old people. But expectations of life have changed. We are living longer. We have a better diet, we exercise more. My grandfather died when he was 66. But he didn’t have statins, he smoked cigars, and back then Pilates was the name of a Roman governor. Today we dress younger and say things like 60 is the new 40, or you are as old as you feel. Apparently just thinking this way can help extend life.

I confess, that when I turned 60, I felt my age. 60 was the old 60. My mum had just died and so I was viscerally attuned to mortality, fixed on my finitude. The style magazine mantras weren’t cutting it. Nor did I have the energy to burn and rave at close of day. I couldn’t help thinking that this putting off of old age was really a putting away of the inevitable truth - something my even 6-year-old self was dimly aware and afraid of - that this life will come to an end one day.

The Psalm says our length of days is 70 years or 80 if we have the strength – and it acknowledges that the span is but trouble and sorrow. God knows we live in a world where lives are cut short, where so many die young and don’t even make it to six, let alone sixty. This life is a gift but it’s not a given. For every Octogenarian dictator there is an innocent man killed at thirty three.

When it is written that our days are numbered, it is not a warning. It is a hope. The Psalmist says all our days have been counted because we count to God, whatever our age, or our lifespan. It is not about how long we live, but that we have been given life. Its precariousness only makes it more precious. Helps us feel the giddy mix of gratitude for the life we have been given, and hope for the life still to be lived.

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