AGING JOYOUSLY: I JUST TURNED 60 BUT I STILL FEEL 22

"What is beautiful and joyful is almost always fleeting and must never be squandered."

By Margaret Renkl, New York Times

I was already in college before I finally understood that my entire life had overlapped with second-wave feminism, a force that transformed American culture without so much as registering on a certain young woman in Alabama. All my life I had been stepping through open doors, it turned out, blithely unaware of the vision and sacrifice and passionate persistence of the women who had opened those doors for me.

Once I understood that, I also understood that I wouldn’t want to have landed on this planet a single moment earlier than I did.

A woman born in Lower Alabama in 1961 has little use for nostalgia. Go back to the “good old days” when women were limited to professions like education or nursing and little else? Back to a time when the opportunities available to Black and brown people, and to Black and brown women especially, were even more profoundly limited? No, thank you very much.

The only trouble with being born in 1961 is that in 2021 you will turn 60, something I did last week. It’s very strange to persist in feeling 22, even as every mirror — and every storefront window and polished elevator door — reveals the truth. Sixty is the point at which people must admit they are no longer middle-aged.

Lately it’s been dawning on me that I would not want to have been born even one minute later than 1961, either. Last week I mentioned this new thought to a friend, and her response was immediate, as though she’d already had it herself: “Because we won’t have to live through the cataclysm...read more

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