I started to panic when I turned 60. But it wasn’t the usual mid-life crisis.

I recently turned sixty. Don’t worry, I don’t have a list of sixty pieces of advice I’ve learned over the years.

But I did recently refer to myself as “middle-aged.” To which a friend quipped, “Oh, really? So you’re planning to live to be a hundred and twenty?”

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Later, I did a a Google search on “middle-aged” and, at least according to Merriam-Webster, it means the period of life from about 45 to about 64.

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I thought about throwing this in my friend’s face, but you know the old political expression: If you’re explaining, you’re losing.

The truth is, my friend had a point. No matter how Merriam-Webster defines my age, there’s now considerably less time in front of me than there is behind me.

Previously, getting older has never bothered me. Turning thirty, forty, and fifty didn’t faze me at all.

It’s partly because my life has mostly only gotten better with each passing decade.

But as I approached my sixtieth, something did feel different.

But what? Did I see myself in some new way now? Less capable? Less relevant? Was I worried about dying?

I pondered my feelings, trying to figure it out. But it didn’t seem like any of that.

My husband, Brent, and I are currently in Sydney, Australia in a beach suburb called Cronulla. It’s a very special place to me because when I lived here as a high school exchange student, the experience transformed me.

As soon as we arrived Cronulla, I started planning all of the things I wanted to do:

• Catch up with old friends.
• Hike the nearby Royal National Park.
• Hike the other nearby park, Kamay National Park.
• Walk the coastline to the north and south.
• Spend the afternoons body-surfing in the water and swimming in the rock pools.
• Walk the Esplanade and catch the sunrise every morning and the sunset every night.
• Take loads of pictures.
• And oh yeah, continue my full-time job producing a newsletter with Brent.

Looking back, I can see I may have been being a little, uh, manic.

Making matters worse, Sydney’s spring weather wasn’t cooperating. I couldn’t do half the stuff I wanted.

I started to feel very, very frustrated. Mania turned to, well, panic. Because I really wanted to do all of the things on my list. No, I needed to do them.

This wasn’t normal behavior for me.

Make no mistake: As Brent and I travel the world, I always want to make the most of my time wherever we live. Brent might tell you that when it comes to sightseeing, I am often a bit driven.

But this frantic urgency boiling inside me felt different. I might not have known what it was or what was causing it, but I knew I didn’t like it.

One Saturday, Brent was scheduled to be busy all day online with some friends. I decided to do one of the coastal walks I had planned.

As I researched my day, I discovered two of the walks weren’t far from to each other. If I did them back-to-back, I could kill two birds with one stone!

Early Saturday morning, I shot out of the house.

I started in Bondi Beach where I had also planned to take pictures of the murals along the boardwalk. But I moved so fast, snapping pictures all the while, that I barely noticed the murals or the coast.

I left Bondi behind and headed north, but a number of sections were closed, which meant long detours. The legs that were open were, quite frankly, boring. I wasn’t happy.

I finally reached Watsons Bay, near the end of my first walk. The best part was supposed to be the last bit up to the lighthouse. But if I did it, I’d miss the ferry to Manly Beach and totally be behind schedule.

I couldn’t choose!

In the end, I chose the ferry and headed off to Manly Beach, one of Sydney’s loveliest spots. I’d been here before, but this time I wanted to take more of it in.

But looking at the clock, I realized if I did that, I’d never finish this second coastal walk. I knew if I didn’t finish it, I’d feel like I hadn’t really done it at all.

Sighing, I hurried off, only to find more closed sections, more detours — and more delays in my carefully planned day.

Fortunately, the tide was low, which meant I could walk along the beach, and I wouldn’t have to go quite so far out of the way. The sand was surprisingly easy to walk on. Maybe I could even make up for lost time.

But as it happened, the view of Sydney Harbour was so beautiful I couldn’t ignore it.

Later, back on the trail again, I noticed that was lovely too. The trees and purple flowers brought welcome relief from the harsh afternoon sun.

I realized how quiet it was — just the sound of the breeze in the grass. And it was cool, a gentle wash on my sweaty face. I started noticing the smells: the flowers, the wild herbs, the tang of the ocean in the air.

The water appeared again, and I registered at least five different shades of blue on the surface and maybe another five shades of green too.

I stopped, finally taking it all in.

This is special, I thought. Like all the special things I’ve seen over the past seven years we’ve been nomadic.

Life is amazing. My life is amazing. It had seriously never been better than it was right then — not just on that walk, but traveling with Brent as nomads. I loved it.

And this, I realized, was why I’d been feeling anxious about turning sixty.

I wasn’t afraid of getting older, not exactly, and I wasn’t afraid of dying.

But one day, I really was going to have to slow down — for health reasons, if nothing else. And one day, I’d have to stop traveling altogether. Age would force it on me.

That was why I felt the urgency I’d been feeling, the panic to do and see as much as I can now.

Because my time felt more precious now. And was growing even more precious with each passing day.

On one hand, this sense of urgency is a good thing: I almost never reach the end of a day and think, man, I wished I’d gotten off of my butt and done something today.

But it has a dark side too. Consumed by that urgency earlier in the day, how many things had I missed that had been right in front of me?

At the start of this essay, I said I didn’t have sixty pieces of advice.

But I might have one.

Try and do as much as you can. But don’t make the mistake of merely “doing” it.

Because you don’t do a life — you live it.

Michael Jensen is an author, editor, and one half of Brent and Michael Are Going Places, a couple of traveling gay digital nomads. Subscribe to their free travel newsletter here.