Finding oneself old ranks among life’s most astounding events. For me, it comes as staggering surprise to discover myself 80.

Yet next week this discovery will be mine. Unfamiliar as it sounds, I will have to acknowledge the fact: “I am 80.”

Up until now, this has been something that happens to other people. When it does happen to them, I have always taken it with a certain detachment. “How wonderful that you have reached this milestone,” and similar well-meant clichés, have been my way of greeting the arrival of others at the four-score mark.

My feelings about others reaching longevity have not entirely prepared me for reaching it myself. I cannot quite get my arms around the reality of my own new age status.

Nor, I suspect, can others when they arrive here. “Of all the things that can happen to a man, growing old is the most surprising.” So Tolstoy reportedly said. If he didn’t, he should have, because this utterance is based on solid truth, profound in its implications, and worthy of a classic Russian novelist.

Another author, Malcolm Cowley, approaches the subject similarly. In his 1976 book, The View From 80, he emphasized the uniqueness of arriving at this milestone.

“To enter the country of old age is a new experience,” Cowley wrote, “different from what you supposed it to be. Nobody, man or woman, knows the country until he has lived in it and has taken out his citizenship papers.”

My own view is not quite so exclusive but I do feel myself to have come into new territory psychically. Reaching this age mark has set off in me unprecedented changes of outlook and emotion. I now think and feel in ways undeniably different from the past.

When I was a boy, my knowledge of people over 80 was general, based on newspaper photos and sightings in public places. My own family elders were in their seventies and I did not meet others older than they.

Almost certainly, I regarded them as people I would never be. They were different ─ gray or white-haired, wrinkled, halting in mobility, and outdated in lifestyle. They seemed, if not a race apart, at least fundamentally in a different world from mine.

It was, almost surely, a world which I never expected to enter myself. Though I would have been polite to all of my elders, I would have known little or nothing about how they regarded themselves. It would await the passage of decades before this gap would even start to be filled in.

Now that I am about to be 80, has it become the new 60? Some supposed optimists would have it such. Taking into account improvements in health and opportunities for education, among other factors, they judge 80 to be the present-day equivalent of a much younger age.

However, I prefer to think of my 80 as the new 80. Rather than projecting myself backward, I look toward the benefits that contemporary old age brings me now.

Among these benefits, I especially value long-term marriage and fatherhood. Similarly, I treasure having my five siblings live long in shared affection for one another and for me.

Friends, too, rank high on my list of honor. Many people have remained close through the years, and continuing these relationships counts for me as worth living for. I only regret having lost so many others to death.

I also feel fortunate to live in a place that offers much stimulation. Local colleges and universities give me continual contact with young people, lots of them six or seven decades younger than I.

Ongoing inspiration for my later life comes from the work of artists, musicians, and other creative people. .
I also take pleasure in hearing from readers, so many of whom have responded to my columns. You have brought a new dimension to my life.

All of these benefits and many others I regard as gifts that have come with my experience of longevity. Longevity itself, of course, is the central gift, one not widely received by many people before the onset of modernity, and then only in countries like ours.

Longevity I look upon as life itself, the gift of an existence that goes further than one might ever have expected. Despite its notorious health problems, 80 brings surprising benefits to at least some people, indeed a great many.

These benefits find memorable expression for me in the sentiments of one of my favorite authors, Florida Scott-Maxwell.

In her 83rd year she wrote: “We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high. If it is a long defeat it is also a victory, meaningful for the initiates of time, if not for those who have come less far.”

Richard Griffin