From what I have gathered from friends who have just turned sixty, they now possess a recognition that more events lay behind them than before them. Appears obvious enough. There is less time to harbor grudges, settle old scores, or simply be mad at someone for a reason you both have long forgotten.
I have had more than one newly minted sixty year old friend contact me in the last few months. No particular reason was offered and none was asked for by me. Something I suppose about round numbers causes us to react this way.
If you are younger than 60 this may not make much sense. Then again I have been your age and you have not been mine. This puts you at an ironic disadvantage any older adult might readily appreciate.
The artist Christo was seventy when he completed The Gates project in Central Park in 2005. The planning on been going on for years and the installation along took a year. It was a wonderful exhibition to stroll through and I thankfully did it many times. These excursions caused me to have a Gatsby moment of wonder. Few historians have matched the closing lines of The Great Gatsby, when the narrator reflects on how the land must have struck Dutch sailors’ eyes three hundred years earlier:
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder.”
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