I turned 40 today.
40 feels, well, ten years older than 30. When I turned 30, I shared my thoughts about it here. I sounded so much younger—ten years younger, to be exact.
At 40, you have a lot of life to look back on. The fact that 20 years ago, I was an adult, kind of blows my mind.
(I’m good at math, eh?)
I guess I need to do these equations to really feel the significance of 40.
Now, I say things my parents used to say. I tell my kids, “When I was your age, we didn’t have the Internet. We had to drive to a place called Blockbuster and rent physical movie DVDs to watch...and then we had to return them!”
Now, having a good night’s sleep is an emergency situation. I feel like I'm ahead of the game if I'm in bed before 10 p.m. Which is my bedtime. Because I'm an adult and I have a bedtime.
Now, the top shelf of my pantry is full of supplements.
Just like my body really craves and needs balance and yells at me when I slip out of equilibrium, my mind seems to need the same sort of balance now more than ever before. Imbalance is a problem that can't go ignored.
I've spent a lot of time, had a lot of conversations, filled a lot of journals and cluttered a lot of space in my mind trying to figure life out--trying to find the balance. My purpose. What I would do. Why certain things happened in certain ways. As though life is a complex math problem, not just simple addition and subtraction.
As my 30s ebbed away, I felt left with this determination, this intuitive warning, this desire to just be as much as I have been doing, doing, doing (but never quite doing enough). That duality of life, being and doing, requires equilibrium, and I've never appreciated that so much as I do now.
In the "being" is where I've found a lot of magic.
Maybe it's my age, maybe it's the fullness of life and all its relationships and responsibilities at "middle age" that grows a desperation to find calm, or rest, or peace, or a break, or a minute, or a moment, but I have never felt so indebted to nature as I have recently for its truth, its raw beauty, its honesty.
It only takes a moment for nature to astound you:
Lying on the grass and listening to the wind in the trees, the catbird's original song to the left, the deafening buzz of prehistoric-looking cicadas hidden in sycamores with peeling trunks to the right. Walking through quiet woods covered in multidimensional green from the sky to the forest floor, surrounded by the stillness and reassurance of friendly, old trees. Sitting in a kayak in the middle of a northern lake, a panorama of trees on hills outlining inky, sparkling water that diffuses all the anxiety in your stomach, replacing it with a weighted calm. The sacred moment of a striking sunrise at its height of intensity. The silhouette of a white pine shaped by the prevailing winds. I'm gonna cry.
I find myself desperate for it--a walk down a path, a bird song, a clump of moss, the texture of clouds in the sky, the joy of the sun, the earthy scent of the rain. When you're always "doing," you can easily miss these moments. Just "being" in nature allows you to fall under its spell.
The cartography of my heart has also become more detailed, more complex. I have always felt this way, but after 40 years of knowing and loving so many people, I can honestly say with conviction that there is no greater joy than what comes from an honest and unfettered conversation, a squeezy hug or a gut-clenching belly laugh shared with someone I love. The thrill of connection remains at the pinnacle of what I value in life.
I feel like the same person I was when I was younger, just the newly-released version: Version 40.0.
I've finally noticed and accepted things about myself that perhaps I never wanted to acknowledge. You know, the pesky attributes that simmer under the surface until you are ready to say hi to them, acknowledge their existence and either help them find a place in your life or deal with them so they are no longer that constant, annoying burden.
I've also had to accept the harsh realities of life that my Version 20.0 or even Version 30.0 self may have been too naive to understand. Amidst the many lovely and fun and exciting and rewarding and amazing experiences of my life, I've seen more unbelievable things happen the longer I have lived, and therefore had to believe that they could happen, which also means accepting that they could happen again. There is much to lose. I suppose one would have seen these things happen by the time your life is statistically half over.
But in a world like the one we live in right now, which feels more strange and less safe by the day, which has been infected by a pandemic of many things, and after having dealt with many challenges, I can see that all the dusky days, the cloud cover, the darkness, the strangeness, the difficulties and the disappointments are what allow me to realize and appreciate the good, all the little bits of happy that really matter SO MUCH...that glow and dance like fireflies against a sometimes dark backdrop:
crafting the perfect cheese sauce
coconut whipped cream in my coffee
the memes and jokes shared in group chats
the unexpectedly delightful things my kids say
the whispered breezes of kindness from others
the joy of making soup for loved ones
the jeans that solve a multitude of problems
karaoke and then more karaoke and then one more song and then JUST one more song
finishing a fantastic book and wandering around for days in the after-haze
the legacies we're all weaving together
This is how I feel at 40.
