Staring down big Six- 0

For some, it feels like doom — for others, it’s a new beginning, writes Joel Yanofsky.

Reminders, as if I need them, are everywhere. Like the government forms that arrived last spring informing me I’d soon be eligible for my pension.

A month ago, my GP called me to discuss the glucose numbers on my latest blood test.

And every piece of junk email that lands in my inbox now seems designed to make me feel ancient. There are ads for diabetes, high blood pressure, overactive bladder, wrinkle remover, walk- in tubs, improving my golf game and, of course, Viagra.

Finally, last week, there was a letter from our synagogue wishing me “mazel tov” on my impending “special birthday.” I was also invited to say a public prayer of gratitude. There’s only one problem. These days, I’m not feeling especially grateful. Just recently, I turned 60. “People say it’s just a number and that is, at the most unimaginative level, true,” veteran journalist Ian Brown told me. “But it’s also a symbolic number.”

So much so that Brown spent 2014, the year he turned 60, keeping a diary of his physical and emotional ups and downs — all the aches and pains, complaints and regrets.

His memoir is called 60: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?

When it comes to aging, says Brown, “we spend most of our energy ... devising ways to pretend it’s not happening.”

Brown focuses, instead, on making 60 his “year of living observationally.”

“I thought it might be an interesting experiment to stare into the face of that denial ( about aging) and keep track, at even the most mundane daily level, of the train coming straight at us,” he writes.

Because there is, Brown explains, a dizzying quality, a doubleness, to turning 60: At the same time as you can’t see yourself as old, you can hardly see yourself as anything else.

My next- door neighbour, Maria Di Stavolo, also turns 60 this month and has no plans to say goodbye to anything.

“I see this birthday as opening up a whole new chapter in my life, a new beginning,” she told me the other day.

“It’s a chance for adventures, challenges. I’m so excited. Isn’t it exciting?”

You got a brand new dance and it goes like this You wake up in the morning and look into the abyss — Brand New Dance, Loudon Wainwright III