When I was thirty, sixty sounded ancient. I assumed that by sixty you'd have everything figured out. You'd be sensible, settled and probably spend an unreasonable amount of time discussing pensions, the weather and whether somebody had moved your favourite chair.
Then I became sixty and discovered I hadn't figured everything out at all. More surprisingly, I didn't feel particularly old.
That's probably the first thing nobody tells you about getting older: the number changes far more dramatically than the person inside it.
You Don't Wake Up Feeling Sixty
There wasn't a morning when I opened my eyes and suddenly thought, Right then, I'm an old man now. I was still Billy.
I still liked the same music. I still enjoyed singing. I still watched football and shouted at people on the television who couldn't hear me. I still liked going somewhere for a beer, having a laugh and talking complete rubbish with people I enjoyed being around. My sense of humour hadn't suddenly matured either, which was perhaps disappointing for everyone who'd been waiting for that to happen.
Of course, your body occasionally sends reminders that you're not thirty anymore. Things can ache for reasons you don't remember earning, and getting up from certain chairs occasionally involves a noise that wasn't part of the original plan. But that's different from feeling old.
The person looking back at you in the mirror changes gradually. The person doing the looking doesn't seem to change at anything like the same speed.
You're Still Allowed to Start Things
I think this is one of the strangest ideas we pick up about age. When you're young, everybody expects you to start things: a career, a relationship, a business, a hobby, a family or a new life somewhere else.
Later on, the language changes and people start talking about slowing down. I've never really understood why.
I'm 63 now and I'm writing books, building Billy's Books and learning things about websites, publishing and online business that I knew absolutely nothing about a relatively short time ago. Some days I think I've finally got the hang of it, then a website decides otherwise and I spend several hours wondering what the hell a server is complaining about.
Perhaps that's good for me. Learning something new reminds you very quickly that age and knowledge aren't the same thing. You can have sixty years of experience and still be a complete beginner at something, and there's nothing embarrassing about that.
In fact, I quite like it.
Experience Doesn't Mean Having All the Answers
One thing I probably did expect from getting older was wisdom. Surely after six decades you're supposed to understand life.
I'm still waiting.
What I do have is experience, and I think that's different. Experience doesn't mean knowing what will happen next. It means having enough things go wrong in the past to know that you'll probably cope when something goes wrong again.
I've made good decisions and terrible ones. I've had successful periods in my life and some bloody awful ones. I've loved people, lost people, travelled around the world, worked with people from all sorts of backgrounds and found myself starting again when I thought that part of life was already settled.
None of it gave me all the answers, but it did teach me that most situations eventually change. When you're thirty and something goes badly wrong, it can feel permanent because perhaps you've never experienced anything similar before. By sixty, you've usually got enough evidence behind you to know that life has a habit of moving on, whether you're ready for it or not.
Sometimes that's frightening, and sometimes it's exactly what you need.
Stop Measuring Your Life Against Somebody Else's Clock
By the time you reach sixty, there are plenty of things you're apparently supposed to have done. You should have the house sorted, finances sorted, relationships sorted and retirement sorted. You should know exactly who you are, what you want and what you're doing with whatever years you've got ahead.
That's a lot of sorting, and real life doesn't work like that.
Some people find the love of their life at twenty; others find them at sixty. Some retire at fifty and discover they hate it, while others work into their seventies because they genuinely enjoy what they do. Some people want grandchildren around them every weekend. Somebody else might want a passport, a small suitcase and absolutely no idea where they're going next.
None of them is doing sixty incorrectly.
The danger comes when you look sideways and decide somebody else's life is evidence that yours should be different. I've done enough of that over the years to know it doesn't help.
The Things That Matter Become Simpler
Something has changed as I've got older. I'm less impressed by things I once thought were important.
Job titles mattered when I was working. Money mattered because I had responsibilities and plans, and being successful at what I did mattered enormously to me. I'm not saying those things were wrong; they were important at that stage of my life.
But eventually you begin to understand that none of them is particularly useful if you're bloody miserable.
These days the things that make a good day aren't especially complicated: Ann-Marie laughing, music playing, something good to eat, a cold drink, finishing a piece of writing I actually like, talking to somebody I care about or simply waking up with something I'm interested in doing.
Perhaps that's wisdom. Or perhaps I've just become easier to please.
Either way, I'll take it.
You Start Becoming More Protective of Your Time
At sixty, time feels different. Not because you wake up every morning thinking about mortality — I certainly don't — but because you become more aware that time isn't something you can keep putting back in the bank.
When I was younger, it was easy to think, I'll do that someday. There seemed to be an unlimited supply of somedays, but there isn't.
That doesn't mean rushing around trying to cram everything into the remaining years. To me it means almost the opposite. I don't want to spend too much of my time doing things I don't enjoy simply because somebody else thinks I should.
I've already done decades of alarms, deadlines, airports, meetings and responsibilities. If I want to spend an afternoon writing, I'll write. If Ann-Marie and I want music on and end up singing and dancing around the house, that's probably a pretty good use of an afternoon as well.
At this age, enjoying an ordinary Tuesday starts to seem considerably more important than impressing somebody with what you did on it.
Sixty Isn't the Beginning of the End
Perhaps that's the biggest misconception I had when I was younger. I thought life happened in stages: you grew up, worked, raised families, retired and then gradually wound things down.
I'm sure that's exactly what some people want, and there's nothing wrong with it. It just isn't how I feel.
My life at 63 certainly isn't the life I expected to have when I was thirty, forty or even fifty. I didn't expect to be living in Tobago, I didn't expect Ann-Marie, I didn't expect to be writing books, and I definitely didn't expect to be sitting here trying to build a publishing business on the internet.
Yet here I am, and there are still things I want to do, places I'd like to see, ideas I want to try and probably several mistakes I haven't got around to making yet.
That's why sixty doesn't feel like an ending to me. It feels more like reaching the point where you've accumulated enough experience to know that plans will change anyway, so you might as well enjoy making them.
If you're approaching sixty and wondering what it's going to feel like, I can't tell you. Nobody can. But I can tell you what surprised me most.
You don't suddenly become somebody else. You're still you.
Hopefully a little wiser, probably a little greyer and occasionally making strange noises when you stand up, but still capable of laughing, learning, loving somebody, changing direction, starting something new and looking forward to tomorrow.
And if that's what getting older feels like, I reckon I can live with it.
— Billy