Forties

Yesterday was my 49th birthday. I’m in the final year of my forties. My forties have been excruciating, enlightening, exciting, enlarging, enlivening, but mostly awakening. I honestly dreaded turning 40, but looking back, I see this decade as the most growing, interesting, “coming back to myself” period in my entire life. If you are one of my younger readers, don’t dread your forties. These middle years will give you a new lease on life. They will remind you of what is really important to you, and in that sense, your forties are very freeing. The forties help you to value yourself and to value your own life more than you ever have before, which in sort of a paradox way, helps you to respect others’ lives better. The forties decade requires you to enter a greater level of acceptance – an acceptance about aging, about the preciousness of time, about the fragility of life and the frailty of unhealthy relationships. You come to an acceptance of just how little you can control others, and you start to really hone in on the one person who you can control and improve – that being yourself. You experience a lot of lessons about change and about letting go, when you are in your forties. You often experience changes in vocations and locations, you experience the passing on of waning elders and the surrendering of your children, growing and moving on, into their own adult lives. You experience struggles and hardships and also, you offer support to others, in their times of tragedy, more than you probably had to deal with in your younger years. That’s okay, though. Because once you reach your forties, you have enough experience under your belt, to understand and to appreciate your own strength, your own stamina, and your own fortitude. In your forties, you believe in your own capabilities more than ever before, and your contemporaries also seem to share that steely confidence. You have enough courage to share with those in need, and enough humility to accept help when you need it. Life becomes more meaningful and precious in your forties. Nothing is taken for granted. You recognize your blessings so much more vividly than ever before, and that makes you feel more hopeful about growing old. You can only imagine that the richness of experiencing life, can only get more enhanced as you age, because on reflecting on the younger half of your life, you see the metamorphosis which you have already undergone and you feel very grateful. You feel so very, very, awestruck and grateful, all at the same time. Young people always think that we older people would go back in time and do it all over again, but I daresay, most of us would not. That’s an exhausting thought. We have earned where we are in our middle years, and that hard won acquired wisdom, is dearer for the time and the energy and the emotion that we’ve put into making our way into our middle years. Young readers, your forties aren’t likely to be easy. No one really gets ten years of “easy”, at any stage of the game. But your forties will better help to guide you to “simple”, in terms of peace, in terms of faith, in terms of Love. Your life will not become easy, but it will become more simple. And simply wonderful, at the same time.