Turning 60 was a shock for me:  “How the hell did that happen?”  I kept asking myself. “Turn your back just for a little while, and BOOM!” I wasn’t angry or depressed, just shocked. Well, and a little bewildered.

It didn’t take me too long to realize and proclaim (to myself if no one else) that Sixty is just a number, its meaning open to interpretation. Others put it this way: “You’re only as old as you feel.” Sixty sounds so old, but I sure wasn’t old! And with that realization, I decided my age was “60 going on 42″ since 42 was closer to how old I actually felt.

There was another realization I’d had about the time I turned 60 that was just awful for me, though it may be a little hard to describe.

I realized that while I’d always felt that the options open to me for growth and development were basically unlimited, now there was a new dimension: NOW, the OPTIONS were still unlimited but my time on earth was not. My dwindling time left on earth meant that the options available to me were fewer, even though still from an unlimited collection of choices.

I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that one bit.

Something else was bothering me, in a related vein. I’d found myself doing something my mother used to do and it annoyed me when she did it and annoyed me even more to find myself doing it, even though when I did it, I did it because I considered it merely an observation of reality: “I’m too old to start this, or learn that….”

Brrrrrr. Hated hearing myself say that, and yet it seemed so true!

Then I had an encounter with a remarkable paradigm shift, thanks to Dr. Oz on Oprah, a video which is no longer available. However, this video report is available and it’s as good or better:

Pretty remarkrable, isn’t it?

It certainly got me to thinking. While I’d never been interested in longevity per se, I also clearly wasn’t ready to be “old” at 60, or to think of my life as more than half over.

After all, I still had things I wanted to do, especially now that I’d (finally) reached that wonderful stage that older women reach where they no longer give a damn what other people think.  (Woohoo!!)

Now, I realized, with this kind of technology going on, the sky’s the limit. ANYthing is possible. In a decade (when I’ll “only” be 70-something), who knows what will be possible or even commonplace?

And, if the span of my life were quite a bit longer than I had been imagining it up to now, all bets were off, I wouldn’t be “too old” to do anything I wanted and my life could still contain unlimited (i.e., infinite) possibilities for learning, doing and being.

Yessirree, that’s for me.

So contemplating all this — especially Dr. Oz with his magic pixie dust (as the stem cell powder was jokingly referred to in the original video I had for this post) — helped me decide to expand my horizons considerably. I now plan to live to 120. For real.

What about you?