Turning 60

Tips for Approaching a Milestone Birthday

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

Hello and welcome to Mature Content, a newsletter about lifelong learning, where I offer tools, insights, and resources for personal growth and discovery. This is the monthly installment of Good Tools, where I feature a strategy for learning something about yourself or the world around you.

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I’ve just turned 60. Cheesy Hallmark cards to one side, milestone birthdays really do give one pause. Part of it is that every five seconds, someone is asking you: “How does it feel to be…30/50/70”? Moreover, if, like me, you live in a country where all sorts of benefits kick in once you hit a certain age, milestone birthdays become doubly hard to ignore. (As of last week, I now qualify for a free transport pass in London, a discounted membership at my gym, and free prescriptions via the National Health Service. To all of which I say…bring it on!)

But hitting a big birthday isn’t always a barrell of laughs. With my six decades of experience, allow me to offer some tips for how to approach a milestone birthday.

Acknowledge Where You are in Life

Let me tell you what happened when I turned 50.

I had always imagined that I would throw a huge party for myself when I hit the half-century mark. There would be a live band, an open mic, and lots of booze. We might even force people to sing some show tunes. I would invite everyone I knew, just as several of my friends had done. In short, my extrovert would have her day in court.

Instead, a dear friend hosted a small dinner party for me with four other couples. We sat round the table eating an elegant meal and were all in bed by midnight. Don’t get me wrong; it was a lovely dinner party. That’s not the point. The point is that I didn’t have a large celebration of myself at 50 because I didn’t feel that I was yet...myself. I was in a job where I felt like I was wearing a costume to work and I’d let my writing languish.

I didn’t run away from those negative feelings. I embraced them. I knew that the disappointment I was experiencing was trying to tell me something. So rather than paralysing me, I let it the sadness sink in. It became a catalyst for personal growth.

Use a Milestone Birthday as a Wake-Up Call

In her book, Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool from Diving In to Treading Water, Penelope Niven talks about how, when you swim alone, it’s not a competitive enterprise where you’re trying to out-do someone else. Rather, it’s about swimming the best that you can and feeling at home in the water. The key to doing this, she suggests, is to identify the unique gift that you have to offer to the world and then to express it. That is your solemn obligation.

That sentiment of having a unique gift and sharing it with the world really resonated with me as I rounded 50. I knew that I had something that was uniquely my own to give. I also knew that I had a lot of energy with which to give it. But I wasn’t doing it…yet.

Shortly thereafter, I left my job at the BBC, and embarked upon a journey of what I now refer to as “integrity.” By integrity, I don’t moral probity. I mean wholeness, unity, and coherence. I spent a year thinking about how to fuse the two sides of my personality: the manager who likes to hit deadlines and get sh$% done, and the maker who likes to create. Within a matter of years, I had started my own business and embarked upon a brand-new book project: the one I’d been writing in my head for decades, but had been afraid to put down into words.

In short, I used 50 as a wake-up call. If I was not going to spend the next 50 years feeling out of touch with myself, I needed to get off of my ass and do something that was singularly “me” with my life.

Celebrate in Style…But Be Sure It’s Your Style

You may not want or need a wake-up call as you approach your next milestone birthday. In which case, I salute you and you can ignore that previous suggestion. But please don’t ignore my final piece of advice: which is to make sure that your milestone birthday is the one that YOU want.

One of Gretchen Rubin’s Secrets of Adulthood is to acknowledge that what’s fun for other people might not be fun for you. So if you don’t like skiing…wine…or pets (sorry!), be O.K. with that. The same goes for celebrating your milestone birthdays.

One friend of mine spent his 50th in a hotel with his wife, with a bunch of weed and some dirty movies. What can I say? You do you. Another friend confessed that she was deeply touched when her husband threw her a surprise birthday party on her 40th. But she found it incredibly stressful to have people assembled from all different parts of her life in the same room. So she gently asked him to please never do that again.

This year, I decided that I didn’t want to celebrate my 60th only once. Instead, I am spreading it out. A good friend (the same one!) hosted a dinner party in my honor with some gal pals (plus one guy) the weekend before my birthday. On the day itself, I went out to dinner with my husband and had posh Indian food. The following weekend, an old friend flew in to meet me in Armenia where I’d gone for work and we visited an ancient monestary

The Tatev Monestary in Southern Armenia

And I’m not done yet! I have a couple more exciting trips planned this year. But that’s me. You may prefer a night at the movies or to avoid the whole thing entirely. That’s cool!

What have you learned from hitting a milestone birthday? Please share in the comments section.