Posts Tagged ‘forty’

Today I turned forty.

When I was a boy, like ten or eleven, forty was as hard to imagine as sixty or eighty. It was a lot like how one stands at the bottom of a skyscraper and looks up, unable to tell if it’s 30 stories high or 50. It’s so far away from where you are that, past a certain point, all ages are equally abstract.

Then as I got older, arriving in my twenties and beginning the journey of marriage, etc. forty was still abstract but less so; it was a place I knew I would arrive one day. Rather like going on a long car trip which is measured not by its destination but by the many stops on the way.

Then, I arrived in my thirties and the advent of forty became more of a reality, feeling like I was as good as there for ten whole years. This is the decade I spent trying to squeeze the last savory drops out of my youth and taste them before it dried up, as I was scared it would.

Now I arrive at forty and yes, I was right about some things. Banal as it may seem for those who are both a lot younger and a lot older, it’s true that my looks and sex appeal have passed their zenith and I am now very readily showing the signs of age, rather than just traces of it. Grey hair, balding, the softening of my frame and the lines in my face. I’m not merely struck by what offends my vanity, either: I am also noticing that I am becoming unhooked from youth. Popular music and movies no longer interest me. My interest in fashion has largely passed from what’s current to what’s classic. I am more receptive and open to trends and lifestyle changes which slow and simplify my pace rather than accelerate it. My young daughters now roll their eyes at me when I let slip the slightest hint that I don’t understand their icons and touchstones.

I knew all that was coming. Though some people have the personal courage (or personal idiocy) to say “I can’t WAIT to be forty!”, I was never like that. My ego connects strongly to my ability to be cool and so detaching from cool makes me feel like I’m going to the gallows.

Though the picture leading up to forty seemed rather dim, as I am painting it for you, when I arrived I was met with something that I did not expect: Strength, brilliance and clarity have come to me in a way that the never have before. No longer am I the shivering, halting boy full of self-doubt that I was in my twenties or the beleaguered, easily-bullied bumbler of my thirties. Though we reminisce about the adventure of unraveling mysteries for the first time while young, we forget that living in a world that’s mysterious is unsettling and disperses energy needlessly. The excitement and fear that is wicked away by those things which will never scare us again was a thrilling part of passing into adulthood, but while people are quick to point out that something is loss in the surrender of innocence they often forget that ten times more is gained.

One of my favorite people recently told me that “the forties are the decade of perfection” and, interestingly, today I really processed that.

I’m forty now. I don’t want anything back that time has taken away. This is where I prefer to be and this will be my best decade.