Sixty

Rhona Canoy

SO… My younger brother turned 60 and we had a celebration of this milestone. In the midst of the revelry, I looked around the room and turned introspective just for a moment.

Looking around the room, I was awed by the thought that collectively there was a total of more than six thousand years of life lived. That’s a lot of living, of experiences, of disasters and triumphs. I tried as best I could to find a point of reference or convergence and was quite surprised to find that the only commonality was in descriptions—we all at one time went to school, graduated, came from dysfunctional families, most got married, had children, now have grandchildren. And yet how these experiences played out in each of our lives is distinct and unique to each one. And no amount of relating or discussing with each other can actually paint a clear picture of what it means.

I suppose I am richly blessed to still have my parents, breathing and being parents to us. In a family of four children plus a mother and a father, more of us are now 60 years old or older, much older. Over dinner or coffee or just over conversation, we often talk about what we have seen in each of our lives. My mom and dad have witnessed the last world war, the creation of the first commercial local airline, television all the way to cable and Netflix. Telephones from hand-cranked ones to smart phones, man walking on the moon which kids born after the very late sixties have not had privilege to witness. Solar and other forms of renewable energy, self-driving cars, the Internet, Google. What gobsmacking developments.

And yet they see how Filipinos have in many aspects still not evolved. How our culture of which we are so proud has imprisoned us in mindsets which are more negative than positive, at least in our relations with each other. And all I can do is to associate these experiences with my own.

I don’t know what it’s like for my brother to turn sixty because that sixty is his life journey. I know what it meant to me when I reached that milestone. As I get older each passing year, I still remain clueless about my age. I know what I have seen. I know what I have gone through. I know what I have survived. And no one else can know these things because this is my life journey. What does sixty mean? What is sixty supposed to be? Is there a handbook that says how one is supposed to act, think, be? At sixty? And beyond?

My body certainly does a good job of reminding me how it has deteriorated. Others will tell me it’s normal as we age. But what I have put my body through justifies how it performs now so in a way it is my life’s journal. Smoking (and certainly not just cigarettes, although I have been smoke-free for many years now), drinking (which thank God I never really liked so I only indulge to excess once or twice a year and live to regret it the morning after), pork (in all its incarnations and the love affair continues), my dislike of fish (having choked on a fish bone as a child) and vegetables (thanks to being forced to eat ampalaya in fifth grade), an athletic lifestyle which has since morphed to a very sedentary one, and love which I have had the blessing to experience (including all the pain it brings).

I guess I’ve every reason to rejoice in a life lived to the fullest. And I shall continue to do so for as long as I live and breathe. Cram it with experiences, realizations, dreams and hopes (still and always), laughter, adventure, travel, good food, my dogs. But not regret. Never regret. What’s done is done and cannot be undone, only not to be repeated. So I don’t make room for regret, and have no reason to. I’ve learned so much and hope to learn more. But the main thing I’ve learned is the difference between regret and being sorry.

To edit Erich Segal, life means never having to say I’m sorry. For choices, for being.