Sum XL

Audjourd'hui, j'ai 40 ans.

Today, I turn 40.

I greet this fact with a mixture of sadness of the inevitable loss of some years, and a sunny, cheerful optimism at those which have yet to come.

When I was in my late teens, twenties, and thirties, I could still cling to the increasingly slippery illusion of being a young man - an illusion that may have been more factual in the beginning, but, as the years wore on, less so.  Still - as far as youth goes, to be a teen is to be naive; to be in one twenties is to be gaining life experience; and to be in ones thirties is to be at the very pinnacle of youth.In one's forties, however, the entire "youth" thing begins to be stripped away, leaving behind the scars and ailments, physical, emotional and spiritual, that time brings. Ones own self is no longer the vessel of almost infinite potential that it once was - instead, in the transitory years between youth and old age, the self becomes that which is being closer to being fully realized, the house that is now being built upon the foundation that has been lain, the poem that is being written from the phrases assembled.

I've heard it said that "forty is the old age of youth, while fifty is the youth of old age". So maybe I should quit worrying about becoming an old man for another decade. Yet, even if forty is to be the old age of a rather prolonged youth , I'd have to face the fact that, mathematically, if not in strict terms of life's being, that I'll be facing my own "middle age" soon enough, when I'll be looking ahead at fewer years than I've left behind (lest I possess a certain mightiness, this could already be the case). Any sort of carefree abandon with which I approached my life has to be discarded- yet, the greatest sadness for me may be that, in my more formative years, I've not been carefree enough.

In my teens, I faced the strict and stifling rigours of an enforced, regimented, extremely conservative religious lifestyle under the suffocating, fundamentalist tenants of the Jehovah's Witnesses faith. In my early twenties, I was in the United States Navy, where, one week after my twenty-fifth birthday, I was stricken with a paralysis on my left side that I would later find out was my very first attack of Multiple Sclerosis. In my mid-twenties and early thirties, I was balancing the needs of a marriage that would eventually fail (due to both my own admitted lack of emotional context and my ex-wife's over-abundance of the same) with the demands of a higher education. In my mid to late thirties, I was flirting about with relationships that would eventually go nowhere while attempting t0 make sense of the "real world". Now, as I enter my forties, I am happily  married to a wonderful, witty and beautiful woman who is soon to be the mother of my children, we have a new house, and have fully embarked on our wholly adult lives as a singly joined couple. It may seem, upon slight rumination, that I have forgone some of the inevitable - and healthy - wanderlust of youth for the inevitably(supposed) forgone certitude of adult life.

Yet, upon further reflection, I wonder if this is such a bad thing.  True, I've not experimented with relationships, careers, lifestyles and places as much as others may have - but then again, I think that my personality and self-confidence has always been such that, even after a rather cursory examination, I've been fairly certain of those which I've found to my liking, and those which, while romanticizing some discrete aspects of (for a surety), I've rejected pretty wholesale as being non-conducive towards the vision of my future self that I've fostered and done my best to bring about over the years.  I can say for a fact that, while I've not been as flighty or eager to undertake some obligatory ritualistic quest to dispel the geas of incertitude as others have been in the course of "finding oneself", I've done so fairly early in life (or at least by now), and I pretty much like what I see.

Pretty much. Yes, there are aspects about myself that I would like to change (the tendency to be overly maudlin may be amongst them); however, for me, that is a proud announcement brought about due, not to any regrets that may have come with the sense of a profoundly (or even mildly) wasted youth, but rather, to the wisdom gained with the passing of the years. I've learned many valuable lessons over the years, through which I've gained said wisdom, and I'd not trade it for the exuberance of youth if the choice were ever presented to me. Chief amongst these lessons is this: treasure the people around you, and the life that you live, for both can be taken away in the blink of an eye. In my attempting to put those words into practice, my life has become fuller with each passing year, with the promise of better experiences to come. This is the key to my optimism.

Graduating college, getting married (again), having a kid, buying a house - all those were accomplishments that, in my life, are taking place belatedly, at least when one compares my life to the "norm". However, I'm pretty hopeful that I'm going into these things, not just with the best of intentions or sunny, wide eyed hope mixed with a dash of almost prayerful faith or driven by my own brand of graceful determination, but also girded with the experience that four decades on this verdant - azure orb has granted me, and with a firmer sense of appreciation than I - who might have earlier felt "entitled" to certain things -  would have had before. As an old friend newly-found recently said to me, "You may be going through some things at 40 that others have been through at 20 or 25 - but just think how much better you'll be those things now than they were back then - or even are today!"

And...

I know that, having an ailment such as Multiple Sclerosis, which can  can both shorten ones lifespan and greatly lesson ones quality of life, I'm fortunate that I made it this far in the relatively good shape that I'm in with a pretty full range of motion. You never truly appreciate the gift of walking, moving or speech until they are gone, if even for but a little while.

So now I'm fully enconsed within what a friend at the birthday party last night calls "dulce cuarenta" (it just so happens that this man was born in the same, year and hour as I was!). "Sweet forty" indeed - I like that. Thinking of my fortieth birthday as being the start of a newer, more hopeful era in my life fills me - surely - with both a serene joy and a calming optimism. Each year may be yet one more year towards my own eventual journey to the undiscovered country - but while I'm still a tenant of this one, I am determined that each year shall also be a better year, full of faith in my own perserverance, a genuine hope for a better tomorrow, and love for those around me who truly matter.