"Life begins at forty" used to be a common saying, but you don't hear it so much nowadays. Young people shudder at the prospect of turning 30. Turning 40 is almost unimaginable to them.
Those who have already turned 30 know that the big milestone birthdays are all too real, and that there's no escaping the next one.
You could see the dreaded day approaching when you were still safely in your mid-30s. That was mostly fine - a little unnerving, but mostly fine. Because, while turning 40 was a few years ahead of you, you managed not to think about it too much. You always knew it was there, but you could safely ignore it.
39 is so Last Year
Even when you reached the terrifying age of 39, you still regarded turning 40 as something remote and impossible. As something like a mythic rumor - a fanciful, almost post-apocalyptic scenario that would surely never come to pass. Not for you...
Now the big day is here, and now you really have turned 40 - no denying it, no ignoring it, any more - you're in shock. But you manage to hide it, and possibly even joke about it. It's here and it's real. You're definitely, irrevocably 40 now. There's no getting away from it. Might as well make the best of it, hey?
Yes, make the best of it. Let's get started.
No, Let's Not Go Clubbing
Western culture favours youth, and the vitality associated with youth, more than almost any other commodity, even money. Age might bring wisdom, but it's pretty certain to ruin your looks.
Turning 30 wasn't really so bad. At 30 you were still more than capable of pulling all-nighters without ill effect if you had to. You didn't get many funny looks in nightclubs. (And you still wanted to go to nightclubs, when you were 30.)
By 40, habits and attitudes have changed. It's likely that you no longer go to nightclubs very often, if at all, and that you no longer really want to.
Like You Have a Choice...
In the final analysis, turning 40 has just got to be dealt with. Firstly, there's no realistic choice in the matter. And secondly, well, you have to make room for the generations coming behind you (who know nothing, naturally).
Turning 40 isn't cruel, it's not a disaster, and it's not even all that frightening. You feel pretty much the same as you did at age 35.
Granted, you're a little more needy of regular sleeping hours than you were ten years ago (in what you now see as the impossibly youthful naivete of being 30).
Have a Mid-life Crisis if You Want To
There's always the "nuclear option." At any time, you're free to plunge gleefully into a midlife crisis, to dress ten or twenty years younger than your age, buy a red sportscar, pick up much younger lovers, and just misbehave yourself. If you want to.
But by the age of 40, most of us are long past the age of excess. Fun and good times have changed. Our faces have started to wrinkle, our waistlines may have bulged a little or a lot, and our hairlines might have receded. The signs of advancing middle age are unmissable.
You might as well accept it. Hating it won't restore the four decades that you breezed through before the terrible day came.
Bad Dancing At 40 is Good Dancing
And in the end, you know, there's a lot to like about turning 40.
It is your exemption from the exhausting routines of youth. You're allowed to tell people that you want to be in bed by eleven. You don't have to go to a nightclub ever again if you don't want to. Your formerly bad dancing is now good dancing, the good dancing of a 40-year-old who can still join in the fun.
Younger family members, friends, and colleagues might even start to respect your perspective on life - perhaps even look up to you - in ways that you never imagined anybody ever would. You've seen things, felt things, and experienced things that 21-year-olds, with all their accursed youth (that they are just going to waste), don't even know exist.
So it Goes
This mature perspective on life isn't something that you seek; eventually it seeks, and finds, you. All you have to do is stay alive long enough.
The last word on growing older should go to the late Bob Hope. Asked how he felt about the aging process, the legendary actor-comedian quipped: "I prefer it to the alternative."
John McNamara - I'm currently studying for an Open University degree, whilst trying to write my fifth (or is it sixth now?) unpublished novel. On top of ...
