Reflections upon turning 40

Today is my 40th birthday, and I have been feeling many feelings.

• Excitement, because it is my birthday and I frankly enjoy being showered in affection and subjected to the high-variance hijinks of my little brood.

• Restless impatience, because there is so much I want to do and haven’t done, and my mom died at 62 and my cholesterol is high and who knows how much time I even have left…

• Then terror, because… 40?? The age Sally freaks out about “someday” approaching in When Harry Met Sally? The age at which one is officially considered “middle-aged”? The age that so many of history’s great talents, like MLK Jr and Michelle Trachtenberg and Frederick Chopin and George Gershwin, never even reached?

And then I told my husband Matt of my grand plan to write a post that catalogues what various great builders had and hadn’t accomplished yet by the time they were 40, and he twisted his eyebrows in scorn. “You’re thinking about this so completely wrong,” he said. And when I rushed in to mount some sort of half-hearted defense he immobilized me with: “You are one of the richest and happiest people who ever lived.”

So then I sat there and tearfully took it in, surrendering to the fact that it was true. Once again, I had slipped into measuring my life against a drill sergeant’s checklist, myopically focusing on discrete “attainments” absent any elevated view of what I am building: the dense web of beloved projects and people and places and prized possessions and peak experiences I have soldered together into a singular, joyfully abundant life.

From that elevation, the impatience and terror faded to light wisps of worry, mostly in smiling tribute to my inner drill sergeants and their well-meaning neuroticism. In their place, two new feelings emerged: in looking back, a flood of gratitude—to whom? to myself, to Matt, to my kids, to my friends and colleagues and clients and every human who has ever touched my life, to the fact of existence itself—and, in looking ahead, a kind of trepidatious resolve: a sense of the vast space of possibility for reaping still further joy and abundance from these remaining 40 years, and a kind of inward nudge toward navigating it wisely, lest I forget that joy and abundance are not the default.

Given Matt’s preternaturally healthy relationship with aging and mortality, it is no wonder he came up with the perfect exercise to do on the occasion of turning 40 himself 3 years ago: after mapping the first half of his life on a timeline from 0 to 40, he then mapped the projected second half on a timeline from 40 to 80. (The whole thread is well worth reading, and gives a more explicit account of the perspective I’m only briefly gesturing at here.) I’ve been recommending this “life mapping” exercise to clients and friends ever since, but only today am I coming to understand its function more fully: it is a retrospective and a roadmap, not for one isolated project, but for the most complex mega-project you will ever build.

So without further ado, I present to you: my retrospective and my roadmap. Elsewhere I have and will continue to elaborate on many of the episodes and aspirations represented here, but for now I prefer to let it speak for itself.

Some of my immediate takeaways from this exercise:

• A decade is way longer than I tend to assume. Seeing how much I’ve managed to do and how much my life has changed in the decade from 30 to 40, despite almost never feeling like I’m moving “fast enough,” gives me a wholly different perspective on what I can expect from each of the decades ahead.

• I am only going to be actively parenting for about 16 more years (which, ok, duh, but this is not something I naturally think about or factor into my life design!). Seeing that fact visualized 1) makes every moment of the next 16 years feel uniquely precious and scarce, and 2) makes salient the prospect of nearly 3 decades in which I will have dramatically more free time and flexibility than I have today, with all the wealth and wisdom I will have gained in the meantime.

• Getting old is actually kind of awesome. (Damnit, Matt, one of these days you WILL be wrong about something! Good thing I have 4 more decades to prove it…)