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.
Tag: decades
Time for Roses
“If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves.” – Maria Edgeworth
I read an article recently that suggested that we overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in a decade. I’ve been milling that idea, around in my head for a while, as we come to the close of another year and also another decade. I am not really sure if I agree with that statement. As a faithful journal/paper calendar keeper, I can assure you that we very often do so much more, in even a day, than we give ourselves credit for doing. Maybe it’s just that we judge a lot of what we do as meaningless or inconsequential. But is that true? It’s all in our perspective, isn’t it? If we were to become physically incapacitated, our daily routine items, the things that we do mindlessly, could all of the sudden become major triumphs and delights. And how many times in just your life, have people who “are just doin’ their jobs” made a noticeable difference in your life? The friendly cashier who cheered you up on a down day, the thoughtful delivery person who helped you carry something heavy into your home, the receptionist at the doctor’s office who was able to find a way to “fit you in” to any already packed schedule, because he or she just sensed that you needed to feel some relief and healing. . . . these people may not have seen any of these actions as particularly important uses of their time or movements towards their life goals, but for you, on that particular day, their doings were difference makers. So, wouldn’t it be a wise use of our talents and gifts and patience and time, to make life a little easier for others? Isn’t that a worthy goal in life? And if we do any reflecting, I imagine that we all do these very acts of kindness, on a daily basis. These are the little things that improve life for everyone. These are the little things that lift the energy of the entire planet. The planet is heavy, but if we all do our part in the lifting, our Earth is so light that we don’t even give the lifting of it, any thought or any merit. Lifting the world’s energy is something that we all do, almost every day of our lives. That is something. In some ways, it is everything.
The older that I get, I find that it is worthwhile to have life goals to pursue, but also every bit as constructive to savor the every moments. It is also vital to accept the surprises as part of “the plan.” Nothing is in vain. There is value to be found in everything, even in “wasted” time.
“Regret for wasted time is more wasted time.” – Mason Cooley
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince.