I have shared a few of Hassan Khan’s brilliant Substack posts, most recently What If Your Best Years Haven’t Happened Yet. He commented as above, and his questions deserved more than a reply in the comments.
Dear Hassan
I’m enjoying the contemplative state in which I’m approaching this birthday. It gives me the opportunity of celebrating my birthday over an extended time, and it feels more meaningful to me that I do it this way, rather than focus all my attention on a date and a party. In this respect your questions are timely.
I’m going to deal with the easiest questions first: I can’t say that I feel either excitement or trepidation, which is not to say that I don’t feel the significance of the milestone.
Part of my response to you is going to drift towards the impalpable, under the general heading of energy, and it is in this respect that I think that I feel the biggest difference in the 60-year-old me. I have become highly focused on doing the things that mean the most to me. The paradox is that doing these things feeds me, so I’m not depleting energy. Consequently, I feel as if my life is running on a baseline of humming energy, which pretty much assures me of feeling good under most circumstances. In this state, age doesn’t seem relevant and I can’t say I feel any less energetic than when I was in my youth.
Being present for the energy I feel right now means that I don’t dwell on the past, nor on things over which I have no control, and I certainly don’t fixate on my own mortality. However, being aware that the sand is running out keeps me focused on what is important to me, and in this respect, I suspect that the younger me was sometimes either wasteful of time, or less disciplined about the things on which I focused my attention. Or perhaps I was still casting about for the things that would remain with me. I was learning, I’m still learning, and as a curious person I expect that to continue.
I think I can point to two things, both of which happened at the end of 2025. Firstly, reading Nick Cave’s Faith, Hope & Carnage reinforced in me the knowledge that I am an artist, which for me is to write, preferably daily. It is not necessary for this to be a commercial exercise, although in time it would be nice if it was. Secondly, I completed Chris Williamson’s annual review, the most interesting part of which is projecting forward (both by a year and to my 85-year-old self) and asking what I’ll wish I had done more of. Once again, creative activities, especially writing, came out top of the list.
A few months ago, while writing the first draft of Floyd Plunkett’s Diary, I went through a two-week period when the words were pouring out of me, and the more they did, the more energised I felt. This year I’ve also been working on drafts two, three, four and five of a more ambitious novel, as well as regularly posting to Substack. None of this is commercial, but it is central to my life that I do it, and it is a big part of why I can turn sixty, and yet feel as if, to riff on the title of your brilliant piece, that my best years are still ahead of me.
I took over running the family stud farm a little over six years ago. In theory, this is a commercial activity, but it is fraught with risk and uncertainty at every turn (I wrote about that here). For the purposes of my response to you, the short version is that being with the horses, as well as the thinking that goes into the project of breeding top athletes, feeds me in several intangible ways to which it is difficult to assign a monetary value.
The biggest thing that I have been, for more than half my life, is a father, first to my daughter and then my son. I am blessed that they are both living with us, although that will undoubtedly change. They are both in the early stages of their working lives, and in some respects, there are overlaps between me taking on new challenges and the jungle gym careers they are likely to have. I love the way that their energy and mine come together.
I am grateful for my health, especially having had the experience of a progression of cancer treatments between 2006 and 2016. I am fortunate that I have a sport I love, in the form of mountain biking, which I hope will support good health for many years to come, as well as feeding my soul when I’m out on the trails. I have no doubt I would feel differently about entering the final decades of my life if I felt poorly.
You ask if my relationship with getting older has changed. There is no doubt that it has. My birthdays, generally, were marked with party-attitude and the sense of other people celebrating me, through gift-giving and birthday wishes (although not in a self-centred way). For this birthday, I feel as if I’m celebrating myself. I’m taking myself seriously, especially for the positive actions that I can take. I aim to live true to the essence of who and what I am. I want to suck the marrow out of my best self, to mangle Thoreau.
You haven’t asked a question about this, but I’m going to include it in my response anyway. I wouldn’t be the person I am at sixty, and I couldn’t look forward to the future in the same way, without Andrea, my wife of close to 32 years (and I wouldn’t have the children who mean so much to me!). My younger self was clearly convinced that she was the right person for me, but I could never have predicted the power and the value of long-term commitment.
L’chaim!
Oscar
PS There won’t be a big party. Andrea has her birthday a month after I do, so we’ve had joint 30th, 40th and 50th birthday parties. It’s not that we have anything against either parties or our friends, but we don’t feel the need to mark this one with a party. Our feeling is that we’d rather spend the money on a special trip with our adult children.