The age of reason(s)

Or, what forty feels like when you don't feel forty.

Photo by Barrie Kreinik.

“I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.”

- Virginia Woolf

June 15 was my fortieth birthday. I was lucky enough to celebrate all weekend with family and friends, both in person and in spirit, and I still feel lustrous with the love that surrounded me. June 15 was also Father’s Day here in the US, a bitter reminder that my father, who died in 2018, will never help me celebrate another birthday.

In the week since, I’ve been thinking a lot about age.

“Never get old,” an elderly woman on a bus advised me recently. We were side-eyeing the old man next to me, who couldn’t get his phone to stop making noise. I finally offered to help him, showing him how to close a metronome app that his fumbling fingers weren’t able to fix. He thanked me gruffly and took the phone back, and the woman looked at me and said, “Never get old,” and I think she was surprised when I smiled gently and replied, “I hope to have the privilege of getting old.”

Clichés abound when one talks about age. It’s only a number. It’s not the years in your life, it’s the life in your years. It’s about how you feel, not how old you are. Life is just a bowl of cherries. (I’m eating a bowl of cherries as we speak and it does not in any way resemble life, but I like that the song begins with the phrase, “People are queer,” and reminds us, “We’re not here to stay.”)

Do I feel forty? I don’t know. How does one feel an age? My right foot, which has been plagued by a complex case of plantar fasciitis since January, feels about seventy. My abs, which have been re-toned through the exercises demanded by the physical therapy I’ve been having for the plantar fasciitis, feel like they’ve been restored to about twenty-five. My hair is getting greyer, my curves are getting curvier, and at any given moment at least two parts of my body hurt.

Is that what forty feels like?

Or maybe forty feels like I did yesterday morning, when I emerged from the subway on 28th Street at 7th Avenue and remembered that twenty years ago, in June 2005, I emerged from that same subway and walked to a nearby acting studio, where I began a summer conservatory program that would leave indelible marks on both my personal and professional lives. Everything on 28th Street looked the same, but different. I felt different, but also the same.

Half my life ago, I thought. Which is the same as twenty years ago, but different.

It’s been twenty-one years since I began coming out of a closet I didn’t know I was hiding in. Seven years since three of my closest loved ones died within seven months of each other. Twelve years since I earned my master’s degree and relaunched my acting career. Two years since I last fell out of love. Twenty-six years since I started high school. Eleven months since I closed my last show. A week since I kicked off the fifth decade of my life.

What does any of this mean?

I’m not really a numbers person. They don’t stick to the surface of my mind the way words do. (You can tell by the way I write numbers out as words.) But I often cleave to time-related numbers, repeating them as a way to make sense of the present moment. I ask old friends, Do you realize it’s been fifteen years or twenty-two years or thirty-five years since we met? A newer friend said to me recently, Has it only been three years? It feels like longer. Perhaps time is an issue of quality, not quantity. Then again, try telling that to someone like my mother, who only got thirty-six years with her spouse instead of the fifty or sixty she could have had, and it loses its meaning.

So what does forty mean? The Torah claims that the Israelites spent forty years wandering in the desert. I don’t remember why—some sort of punishment from God. I don’t believe in that particular God, but I’m interested in the fact that the number forty appears so many times in the Bible. The Jewish Encyclopedia claims that “the Jews seem to have shared with other peoples, especially the Greeks, the notion that the fortieth year was the height or acme of a man’s life,” and that in the Talmud, “the fortieth year is the age of reason,” while according to Aish, “The number forty represents transition or change; the concept of renewal; a new beginning.”

What will my new beginning be?

There are milestones our society values that I haven’t achieved, and there are achievements our society doesn’t recognize as milestones. I’ve never birthed a baby, but I’ve watched two people die. I’ve never been married, but I’ve lived alone and liked it. I’ve killed my own bugs, installed my own blinds, fixed my own sink, assembled my own furniture. I’ve visited thirteen countries and twenty-six states. I’ve made and lost friends, found and relinquished lovers, looked after babies and sick people, worked with hundreds of colleagues at dozens of workplaces. Yet there’s still so much I want to do with my life, it’s easy to feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.

I know from watching people leave this world before they wanted to that we have to seize the moment, the hour, the day, that we should let nothing slip by unremarked, that when we love people we have to tell them and when we want things we have to pursue them. Sometimes it’s a struggle for me to stop, pause, rest, take a break, not feel like I’m wasting time if I’m not using every waking hour to create something.

Will that sense of urgency abate or increase with age?

By some standards, forty is the start of “middle age”—which should be a neutral distinction, simply the midpoint of an average lifetime, but its connotations are so negative, I hesitate to claim it. Who wants to be “middle aged” in a society that venerates the young? I wish we worshipped the old instead. I wish middle age didn’t signal the beginning of the end, but rather the continuation of a journey that bends toward divine wisdom. Imagine what living in that kind of society would feel like. What if, for instance, grey hair was desirable? What if we all aspired to go grey, pitied the people whose heads stay dark till they’re sixty, gave up the effort and expense of dye jobs and embraced our bodies’ natural process of showing the world how much life we each have lived? What would that kind of aging feel like?

We resist it, I know, because our culture does not teach us how to confront mortality, either our own or anyone else’s. Getting older necessarily means approaching death, and resisting the signs of aging gives us the illusion that death can be resisted too. We’re not taught how to cope with death and dying: we don’t even use the words most of the time, preferring to pass away or simply to pass or even (I heard this recently and cringed) while he was passing, as if dying was a gentle process of quietly drifting from one world to the next. (Newsflash: it’s not.) Of course, most of us don’t want to die, but facing the fact that we all someday will is not the same as accelerating that fate. If I’ve learned anything in forty years—well, really, in the past seven—it’s that learning how to cope with death as both a concept and a reality can help us live more fully, instead of living in fear.

Do I have regrets at forty? No. Are there things I wish I’d done differently? Absolutely. But if I could have done them differently, I would have—hence, no regrets. Perhaps my age of reason is upon me.

I don’t have the career I once thought I would, but I believe I have the career I’m supposed to have. I haven’t yet made the love match I’d like to make, but I have a life full of love that I’m grateful for. I no longer feel that everything is ahead of me, the way I felt when I was twenty-two. Some things are definitively behind me, and sometimes that’s sad, but most of the time it’s liberating.

In fact, if forty were a feeling, I think I’d have to call it freedom.

#birthday #aging #forty #milestones #life #death #dying #living #love