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My Epic Leap Into “The Senior Zone”
My dizzying entry into the How’d This Happen? decade
As decades go forward in life, there are milestones. And yes, the leap from being twenty-nine to thirty seems gargantuan, but it turns out to be okay. Then from thirty-nine to forty, well nobody wants to be forty but, it ends up feeling more like a skip then a leap. Forty-nine to fifty is pretty cavernous, but I have to say that in my own experience, the epic leap of my life has been fifty-nine into sixty.
If you haven’t been there yet, let me clue you in. You’re eligible for things like your company’s pension plan. That seems like a term that should be twenty years off my radar, but nope, it’s right in my slightly blurry field of vision! When you are twenty-nine to thirty or thirty-nine to forty, how you label yourself doesn’t change all that much. You don’t refer to yourself as a “Pensioner” and you don’t worry about the Medicaid/Medicare fiasco that looms over us fresh-to-sixty-year-olds in a mere five years.
Beyond the grey hairs which may have cropped up in the late thirties or early forties, beyond waking up feeling a little creaky and having to work out and eat better, there is something else. There is this whole, “I’m in my sixties” thing. “I am sixty-years-old. I am a sixty-year-old woman.” There are lots of fears associated with that…
