60 Is the New 40. Until I Look in the Mirror.

60 Is the New 40. Until I Look in the Mirror

I have a favourite aging mantra. 60 is the new 40.

I quite like 60. I don’t particularly want to be 40 again, and I sure as hell don’t want to be 25.

But 60 is definitely the new 40.

Until I look in the mirror.

Or worse, catch my reflection unexpectedly walking by a store window. Mirrors at least have the decency to give you some warning. You generally know why you’re standing in front of one.

But store windows? They’re sneaky bastards!

This morning I was watching a YouTube video by a man in his fifties called I Don’t Want to Be 25 Again. He was talking about aging and that peculiar experience of still feeling very much like yourself until you unexpectedly see your reflection and think, essentially:

Who the hell is that?

He makes some great points about aging.

Unfortunately, that is sooooo not where my brain went.

I started thinking about the Aymara people of the Andes.

As one does.

Apparently, I’ve Been Facing the Wrong Way

Yesterday, for reasons completely unrelated to retirement, I was reading and I stumbled across something fascinating about the Aymara language.

Those of us who speak English have a firmly established way of talking about time.

The future is ahead of us.

We look forward to things.

We put difficult experiences behind us.

We look back on our lives.

The past is behind. The future is ahead.

It feels so obvious that it barely seems metaphorical.

Except it is.

And it isn’t the only way human beings have made sense of time.

Researchers Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser studied the Aymara language and found something rather wonderful.

In Aymara, the spatial relationship can run the other way.

The past is in front.

The future is behind.

The Aymara word nayra relates to eyesight and the front, and it also appears in expressions referring to the past. Qhipa, associated with back or behind, appears in expressions referring to the future.

Before we gallop off into one of those irresistible internet claims about an exotic language proving its speakers experience reality completely differently from everybody else, there’s more to it than vocabulary.

Núñez and Sweetser also looked at gesture.

When Aymara speakers talked about the past, they gestured in front of themselves. When talking about the future, gestures could go behind them. That convergence between language and spontaneous gesture was part of what made their findings so interesting.

And the logic is surprisingly intuitive.

The past is known.

It has been experienced. Remembered. Seen.

The future hasn’t.

It’s unknown.

Unseen.

So why on earth would we put the thing we can’t see in front of our eyes and the thing we can see behind our backs?

Well, shit.

Then Some Guy Looked in a Window

Less than 24 hours after learning the Aymara thing, YouTube handed me Jamie Robins, a man in his late fifties, talking about catching sight of his aging reflection.

I love when this happens. Associative thinking!

Not the aging-reflection part. YouTube unexpectedly throwing something at me that collides with something completely unrelated already rattling around in my head.

Because suddenly I wasn’t particularly interested in whether this man felt 25, 40, or 58; or actually was.

I was interested in which direction he was facing.

The younger man he had been was completely visible to him.

Not literally standing there, obviously. But known.

He remembers being 25.

He knows what he looked like. He knows things he did. He remembers places he lived, people he knew, mistakes he made, things he believed, and probably some spectacularly questionable clothing choices.

Although I think I have the same sweater he’s wearing, so perhaps I should shut up.

There may be photographs.

And there may be people who remember him.

There is evidence.

He can, in a meaningful sense, see that man.

But the 75-year-old version of himself?

Invisible.

He has never met him.

He doesn’t know exactly what he’ll look like, where he’ll live, what he’ll care about, what he’ll be doing, whom he’ll love, what he’ll have lost, what he’ll have learned, or even whether that man will exist.

Yet in English we would say the 25-year-old is behind him and the 75-year-old is ahead.

Which suddenly struck me as very strange, at least in the moment.

Maybe the Aymara aren’t facing backwards.

Maybe we are.

Nerds refer to this verbal phenomenon as: sagittal space-time mapping. Colour me there…those are great nerd words!

60 Is the New 40…Sort Of

This is where my beloved little mantra gets more interesting.

60 is the new 40.

I usually mean it flippantly. I don’t experience 60—or my version of it, anyway—as particularly old.

But that’s different from wanting to be 40 again.

And it’s very different from wanting to be 25 again.

I don’t.

Thank God!

Being 25 was exhausting.

But I can see her.

I know that woman.

I know what she wanted. I know some of what she was afraid of. I know things she didn’t know then.

I know where she was going.

She didn’t.

That’s the peculiar advantage of standing where I am now.

The older I get, the more territory exists in the direction I can actually see.

My childhood. Nursing. Marriage. Motherhood. The fire service. Becoming a Fire Chief. Retiring. Friends. Mistakes. Successes. Grief. Ridiculous decisions. Good decisions that looked ridiculous at the time.

People I knew.

People I miss.

Versions of myself I remember clearly and others I can barely reconstruct.

The landscape of the known keeps getting larger.

Meanwhile, somewhere behind me is an old woman I have never met.

Maybe she’s 80.

Maybe she’s 90.

Maybe she’s still writing weird shit on the internet.

I hope so.

But I can’t see her. Somehow though, I know she still feels almost 40!

Perhaps Aging Is a Bit Like Walking Backwards

I’m not suggesting we all start walking around backwards because an Andean language has a fascinating spatial metaphor for time.

Nor am I suggesting that Aymara speakers possess some mystical understanding of aging that English speakers lack.

That would be taking a genuinely interesting piece of linguistics and turning it into inspirational refrigerator-magnet crap.

What fascinates me is much smaller.

Language gave me another way to look at something I thought I already understood.

I’ve spent my entire life talking about moving forward.

Looking forward.

Leaving things behind.

The road ahead.

The years behind me.

Then one linguistic difference flipped the whole picture around.

What if I’m not travelling through life facing the future?

What if I’m backing into it?

Not fearfully.

Not regretfully.

Simply because you cannot see what hasn’t happened yet.

And perhaps that’s why the image of that man catching his reflection stayed with me.

The surprise wasn’t that he had become older.

Of course he had.

It was that the man looking out of the window didn’t quite match the man he could still see so clearly in his mind.

One was visible in memory.

The other had arrived without ever being visible in advance.

The View Gets Bigger

There is something else I like about this way of imagining time.

Aging usually gets described in terms of what is shrinking.

Years remaining.

Physical capacity.

Possibilities.

Time.

But if the past is the landscape in front of us, something is also getting bigger.

At 25, I couldn’t see much of my life.

At 40, I could see more.

At 60, there is an enormous amount of terrain in front of me.

Not because I live in the past.

Because I’ve accumulated one.

And that strikes me as entirely different.

Maybe that’s part of the strange experience of getting older that a shop-window reflection exposes so efficiently.

The person looking back at us contains every younger version we can remember, while the person we’re becoming remains somewhere out of sight.

60 is the new 40.

Until I look in the mirror.

Then 60 is 60.

And that’s fine.

I don’t want to go backwards.

Besides, apparently I’ve been facing that direction all along.

Related Reading

If you enjoy following ordinary observations that turn into bigger questions, you might also like:

• Retirement Language: George Orwell and Yuval Noah Harari Walk into a Bar
• Pappy, Participation, and a Retirement Toast 
• Reality Orientation And Adjusting To Retirement: It’s Thursday, Jerry!
• Identity After Retirement – Was the Elephant Actually Wearing Pyjamas?

• Hendricks, R.K., Bergen, B.K. and Marghetis, T. (2018), Do Metaphors Move From Mind to Mouth? Evidence From a New System of Linguistic Metaphors for Time. Cogn Sci, 42: 2950-2975.
• Núñez, R. E., & Sweetser, E. (2006). With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time. Cognitive Science, 30(3), 401–450.