On Turning Forty
I celebrated my fortieth birthday without actually celebrating. I appreciated the somber aura of this new decade, but didn’t feel a need to dress the day up as an occasion worthy of much more than the annual bombardment of my social media accounts by well-wishers. Parties are for manic energy and day-glow party favors and blue jean pockets bulging from two week’s allowance blown on arcade tokens. I preferred contemplation and the quiet satisfaction that a younger me would be proud of my progress but ready to get on with it already.
And that is why I like entering my forties. The decade of the scholar. Of the survivor. Of the learned. Of the battered, but resolute. I’ve longed for this era of my life as if it was a distant, columned cathedral slowly rising from the chaos of youth and offering a refuge where I no longer just endured. Instead, I could thrive. Turning forty was taking my first steps into a great, marble-adorned lobby of adulthood. You see, nothing before really felt like adulthood. It felt like coping. Wrangling children, sealing gaps in the walls, nudging rusted buckets beneath the glistening ceiling beams weeping at the roof’s failure to keep out the storm.
But there are fewer cracks now, fewer bugs skittering along the kitchen counters, and the children are now young men who only bear my DNA and a portion of my life-view. They have shed my influence and are determining their own way of defeating life. I will always be their father, but I am no longer their overlord.
So, I can look away from the day-to-day and gaze into the horizons. This is why I am certain I am entering my peak as a writer. This is not aggrandizement, so much as acknowledging that if I am to do something great, I have twenty more comfortable years to do it. If I am fortunate, I will have thirty years. If I am blessed, I will have forty years. Another lifetime. It is like being born again, but this time armed with some context to the mysterious sights and sounds of Earth. True, I’ve grown numb to a degree, grown weary to a degree, but I’ve also grown emboldened by the fact that I don’t fail all of the time.
Let’s be optimistic and say I have forty more years to write before age finally hobbles my creativity. How many books will I read in that time? How many teachers will gift me with insight as I sit cross-legged and wiggle-worm in my eagerness for enlightenment and affirmation? How many years of my second lifetime will be wasted?
I feel I’ve built a sound foundation. I still grasp and stumble more often than I would like, but less and less each year. To be a great writer, I need a great voice, a great idea, and a great editor. I can purchase only one of these things, but I can continue to work on the other two. I may never write anything that will be perceived as culturally significant, but I have a few decades to find out for sure. This has been my only goal as an adult, and here I am, matriculated into adulthood, wandering the pristine hallways, name tag that still smells of Sharpie and new plastic, sensible shoes lightly crunching down on the freshly-cleaned carpeting. Yes, the white halls are a bit too institutional, but that is how it is to work in the industry of adulthood. Even in the creative field, we aren’t here to play or to survive anymore. We are here to do the work while we still have time and energy.
What is the significance of forty? Couldn’t I have started this phase at nineteen or thirty-two or twenty-six?
No.
Humans like landmarks and numbers that correspond to our fingers. I can flash both hands out in front of me, every finger spread out wide, my smile proud and knowing. Then I can curl those fingers into fists before flashing them out wide again. If I do this four times, I will have shown you the equivalent of forty fingers. That seemed like a lot when I was a child and just beginning to test out my skills as a storyteller. At that age, I believed writers must be old. They must be emboldened and nourished by time. I was not a prodigy nor did I see much appeal. I wanted to play the long game. The twisted, agonized, and romantic game. Ignore me, ignore me, ignore me. Now, revel in me and the years that I wear like gleaming armor that makes my art impervious and undeniable.
Yes, that is silly thinking, but I was in the fourth grade and in rapture as my teacher read my story to the class. She fumbled over the names and held for laughter. Not all the moments hit like I’d hoped, but enough did. One student asked to read it afterwords, to soak in the words scratched out in my untamed cursive. I’d written a new mythology based on the Greek’s diorama of meddling and imperfect gods and goddesses. I even named one of the gods after Garfield The Cat but I’ve since forgiven myself.
This was not the birth of my audacity, though. The birth came when I committed myself to a new way by writing down the story rather than just speaking it, as was my childhood normal. I tossed away the freedom of the oral tradition for the permanence of literature. It was an act of devotion more significant than anything I’d ever attempted in our neighborhood church. Handing that double-sided, eraser-smudged paper to my teacher was when that audacity was grafted to my self-worth. Shortly after, I decided that forty was a number that implied reason, worldliness, and a voice as sharp and sturdy as a sword fired and hammered and fired and hammered and fired and hammered. It was also the age of my father who would forever serve as my own yardstick for adulthood and self-worth.
I am sometimes delighted by my own writing. I am sometimes horrified. I hope this is healthy but even if it is not, it is still my way and it’s brought me along this far. The last book I wrote is the best book I’ve ever written. This is the goal for the next twenty, thirty, and forty years of my life. This is my purpose for entering the industry of adulthood. I have a second lifetime to reward the faith I placed in that forth-grader who thought he could write a better mythology than the great storytellers whose words had traversed over two thousand years. I believed my words could do the same.
And I still do.
Forty. The decade of actionable delusion. I am so happy to be here.