At Sixty, I Suddenly Became the Young One

Today was a barbecue day.

Nothing particularly unusual about that by itself. It was a family birthday celebration for my partner and her parents. Yes, there were several birthdays involved. In this family, apparently September is not so much a month as a scheduling problem.

Then came the first surprise.

My cunhada — the Portuguese word I naturally use for my partner's sister — was there. She lives in Sweden and had flown all the way to Moldova specifically for the family celebration.

That was already unexpected.

Then came the second surprise: it was her birthday as well.

At that point the barbecue had become less a birthday party and more a small statistical anomaly involving one family, several generations and a remarkable concentration of birthdays.

But somewhere during the afternoon I noticed something else, something much less obvious and much more interesting.

I looked around the table

Apart from my partner and my cunhada, everybody around me was sixty or older.

Including me.

I turned sixty this year, which is still a slightly strange sentence to write. I do not particularly feel sixty. Of course, I understand perfectly well how calendars work, and I have no intention of arguing with basic arithmetic. But the number and the internal perception of the number are not necessarily the same thing.

So I was sitting there looking around at the older generation and, without consciously thinking about it, seeing them as the people I should keep an eye on.

Are they comfortable?

Are they eating properly?

Is somebody getting tired?

Does somebody need help standing up, carrying something or getting somewhere?

It is a familiar mental pattern. When we spend time with people older than ourselves, we naturally start assuming a little responsibility for them. Not because they are incapable, but because age gradually changes the balance of attention within a family.

Except there was one rather amusing problem with my perception of the situation.

They were watching me in almost exactly the same way.

I was looking at them as the older people whose wellbeing I should be concerned about. They were looking at me as the younger person whose wellbeing they should be concerned about.

And somehow, at sixty years old, I had become the young guy.

The young guy, aged sixty

There is something wonderfully absurd about being sixty and discovering that you are still considered young.

Not young in the artificial sense of someone saying, "Sixty is the new forty." I have never had much patience for those slogans. Sixty is sixty. There is nothing wrong with that.

I mean young in a completely relative sense.

If you are twenty-five, sixty probably looks ancient.

If you are sixty, eighty looks old.

If you are eighty, the sixty-year-old sitting beside you may genuinely appear to be the youngster at the table.

None of these perspectives is necessarily wrong. They simply depend on where you happen to be standing on the timeline.

That was the part I had never really considered before.

I have spent much of my life unconsciously dividing people into generations: younger people, people around my age and older people. At some point, of course, I crossed the invisible boundary into the category that a twenty-year-old would certainly call "older".

But there is no final boundary.

You just keep moving through different versions of the same relationship.

At sixty, I can be the old man in one room and the young man in another.

Concern also changes direction

What made the situation especially funny was that the older people were concerned about my health.

From my perspective, this was almost backwards.

I was looking at people older than me and thinking about whether they were all right. Meanwhile, they were looking at me and asking, in their own way, whether I was all right.

There was no contradiction in it.

Concern within a family does not follow a simple hierarchy where the younger generation takes care of the older generation and that is the end of the story.

People continue worrying about the people younger than them no matter how old those "younger" people become.

A sixty-year-old may look perfectly grown-up to the rest of the world, but to somebody in their seventies or eighties he can still be the younger member of the family who needs to look after himself properly.

Growing older does not necessarily mean that people stop looking after you. Sometimes it simply means that everybody involved in the conversation has become older together.

There was something comforting about that realisation.

We often associate ageing with roles disappearing. Parents become elderly. Children become adults. Families change. People become more independent, and eventually some members of the family begin needing more practical assistance from others.

But the emotional roles do not always disappear at the same speed.

Someone can still look at you and see the younger generation even when you have grey hair, decades of professional experience and sixty birthdays behind you.

My definition of “old” keeps moving

I suspect most people quietly move their definition of old age as they themselves get older.

When I was very young, forty probably sounded old.

Later, sixty sounded old.

Now I am sixty.

And, unsurprisingly, sixty no longer looks especially old from here.

That does not mean pretending that age has no consequences. It obviously does. The body changes. Energy changes. Recovery changes. Health becomes something that deserves more attention rather than something that can always be taken for granted.

But age is more complicated than simply counting years.

There is chronological age, physical condition, experience, independence, family role and, perhaps most interestingly, the age other people perceive you to be in relation to themselves.

Today I experienced that last one very clearly.

I was sixty years old, surrounded by people I instinctively regarded as older people.

And some of those same people were apparently looking across the table at me thinking more or less the same thing I was thinking about them:

I hope he is taking care of himself.

There is no single moment when you become old

Perhaps that is the real lesson I took away from an otherwise ordinary family barbecue.

There is probably no morning when you wake up and definitively become "the old person".

Instead, the roles overlap.

You can be responsible for people older than you while somebody older still feels responsible for you.

You can give advice to younger people and still receive advice from people who remember being your age.

You can feel old compared with one generation and surprisingly young compared with another.

And perhaps this continues for as long as there is somebody older sitting at the table.

Age is absolute on a birth certificate, but strangely relative around a family table.

For me, that was the unexpected part of today.

I had gone to a barbecue thinking about birthdays, food and family.

Instead, somewhere between the conversations and the people gathered around the table, I realised that turning sixty had not automatically placed me permanently on the "old" side of life.

Apparently I am still the young guy.

At least in the right company.

And I have to admit, at sixty, that is not an entirely unpleasant discovery.

AI Assistance Disclosure: This article is based on my original experience, observations, humour and conclusions. Artificial intelligence was used as an editorial assistant to organise and expand my original notes, improve grammar and wording, and develop the reflection into a coherent article. No external factual research was required for this personal account. The experience, interpretation and conclusions remain my own.