I'm 40 now

One of the things that gives me the sort of small simple pleasure I associate with getting old is feeding the birds. We have five tray feeders in our backyard, and a regular shipment of bird food from Amazon, and when I remember it—I'm the only one who remembers it—I fill them all, usually with my two-year-old daughter who likes scooping up the seeds and grain with the little plastic bowl, but has to be watched carefully because she also loves tipping the trays and spilling the food all over the ground.

There are two problems with the operation. The first is that the bulk of the seeds are eaten by the squirrels, and while it's always made me laugh to think of the disdain we hold for the poor squirrels—they're just different animals who also need to eat—I still get annoyed when I catch them on their clever raids. Not so annoyed that I do anything about it, but annoyed anyway.

The second problem is my own inconsistency. I can go two or three weeks diligently filling the trays, but then I'll forget for long stretches and they'll sit empty. And I wonder if the birds are resourceful enough that they can get food anywhere, and none of it matters, or if I'm creating a dependency by feeding them in the first place and then leaving them hungry once they've come to count on me. Is my little dilettantish bird habit doing more harm than good?

Resolution, age 40: Feed the birds more consistently.

*

The quote I've thought about every day for months came from a friend's Medium post, and this friend didn't know where it came from. Nor can I seem to Google the origins, so it'll have to go unattributed. But the idea is essentially that life mimics a train ride, where at the start, if you look down out the window, you can see each individual train track. These tracks are the years of our lives, and they're distinct and clear and to some extent you can experience each one on its own. Then, as the train picks up speed, they begin to blur together, until you're going so fast that even though you know each track is there, it's impossible to differentiate them, and they disappear more and more quickly beneath you.

I don't think I've ever read anything truer, and this is the problem with being 40. It's not just that half of my life is gone (if I'm lucky). It's that time keeps getting faster, and the years that remain to me will slip by with such heartbreaking speed that even if I'm lucky enough to be granted a second 40 years, it will not be the same as the first 40. I know in my heart it will race away from me at a pace I'm totally unable to control. From age 5 to 10 was an eternity. From age 30 to 40 was a flash, and the next time I blink, I know I'll look out at the world from the eyes of an old man.

I ran this idea by father, who found it just as compelling as I did, maybe even more so, and I asked him if it changes again—if it gets slower at a certain point, if you're granted the reprieve of a little temporal space as life enters its autumn and winter.

"No," he told me. "It just gets faster."

So this, I think, is what feels different about 40. I haven't yet begun to feel the physical woes that my parents and older friends assure me are coming, but at the root of my brain there is a keener understanding of what it means to age. I could have told you at any age that one day I'll have to die, but with the acceleration of the train, I understand now that even if death is 50 years away, it's going to happen so soon.

*

What else has changed in ten years?

If the big revelation at age 30 was that I was explicitly not a genius—an insight that sounds depressing but was actually incredibly freeing—the transformation at age 40 is about the ebbing of certain fires. Five years ago, for instance, I was at the peak of my political passion. Today, I simply don't care as much. I had been told by relatives for years that I would turn conservative when I got old and had to pay taxes, and I think it's safe to say now that it will never happen, but there's a sea change in how I believe what I believe. The best way I can explain it is that while the fundamentals haven't changed, the view of the world has, such that I no longer put so much hope in the results. This may sound sad or defeatist, but the inevitability of where we live has settled within me, I see the weakness and hypocrisy in my "side" more clearly, and it seems to me that the only sane reaction to all that is to turn the focus inward, to make my world smaller, and accept the broader permanence of wherever we're heading as a human race, good or bad. After all the agonizing of the last decade, the wisdom left to me boils down to the serenity prayer they use at AA meetings—knowing what I can't change, and accepting it.

Having children has probably been a great engine of that switch, if time alone wouldn't have done the job. It's hard to talk about children in any public way, because there's such tension around the topic among middle class white Americans, and of course there are people who want them and can't have them, and always you feel like you're navigating around all the sensitivities, but in the end I only have the honesty I want to present, and the honest truth is that the love I have for them is almost blinding in its intensity. The day-to-day headaches, the change in lifestyle, all the things you can no longer do on a weekend, pale in the presence of that love. It bonds me more than I thought possible to my wife, and to the idea of our small unit. And it's only natural that other elements that once burned so brightly also begin to dim. It's not the only thing that matters, but it matters a lot, and everything else has to give way.

*

We visited my 89-year-old grandmother in the hospital in upstate New York in December, and I wanted my five-year-old daughter to treat the moment with whatever respect and gravitas she could muster. This is not going to be fun for you, I told her, but it's going to mean a lot to her, so give her a hug when you come in and be nice and try not to whine about leaving too much. She did a pretty good job, plus or minus climbing all over the furniture and hanging on my neck—I give her a B+.

I have a vague memory of my mom bringing me to see her grandmother in a care facility when I was very young, and how boring and unpleasant it was. I was scared, apparently, of the old woman's wrinkles. I had no reason to ever think of that again until we made the trip to New York, and the exact same dynamic played out. Here I was in the presence of this woman I loved completely, with whom I shared so many great memories through four decades of life, and who had literally always existed for me. But for my daughter, who can only understand so much of this, she was just an old woman in a hospital. But for the old woman, that little girl was the cosmos—a person she'll know for a very short time, but who represents the future of the family she built. The amount of love coming down through the years is almost stunning in its intensity, and my daughter probably could have sneered and shouted and yelled and still been given the instant gift of forgiveness.

My grandmother has serious physical issues, but she's lucky to have almost all of her mental faculties intact. We can talk about anything, and at one point, we had a slight misunderstanding that took us in an interesting direction. We were remembering the Christmas Eve dinners she and my grandfather used to host at their house, when all her eight children and umpteen grandchildren would come for a big party, and how that tradition had slipped away. I made some banal comment about how maybe someone in the family would start the tradition again—there's absolutely no chance of that—but she misheard me, and thought I was making a spiritual comment, that we'll all have Christmas Eve dinners together again someday in heaven.

"I don't believe in that," she told me.

Once I realized where our wires had crossed, I understood she was saying that she didn't believe in God or heaven. I pressed her on it as gently as I could. There’s no afterlife, you think?

"I hope not," she said. "I'm tired. Let it be done."

We laughed at this, and she was smiling too, but it was a genuine belief and a genuine desire. My younger sister who was there with us told her that she would see her husband again, my grandfather who passed at age 90, but she shook her head and made a joke about how old he'd look.

I found this very courageous. She's out of the hospital now, but she's smart enough to know death isn't far off, and at a time when it must be tempting to seek the reassurance of an afterlife, she seems to have stuck to her guns. And this is not some lifelong heretic—she grew up in the French- and Irish-Catholic tradition, raised a giant family full of children with Irish-Catholic names, and was very rooted in her community. But she had taken an honest appraisal, and no circumstances could shake her off her conclusion.

God is something I've always thought about, and at 40 I think I've reached my final conclusion, which is that I feel something mystic and spiritual in the air from time to time, but I know it could all be chemicals in the brain, and the only destination I can ever arrive at is a hardboiled agnosticism, because I can't for the life of me see how any conclusion but "I don't know" makes sense for me. Sometimes, in religiosity or atheism, I see what frustrates me about the secular world, which is the larger discomfort we seem to have as people with uncertainty. But increasingly I see the reasons behind this, which in religion's case you can probably trace back to the dawn of humanity, and then I start to wonder if the erosion of this element of life is, in fact, a bad and isolating thing.

But I can never shake the idea that our search for answers, which must start as a genuine yearning, grows toxic when our desire to believe something inevitably overcomes the desire for real truth, and leads us to a prison of our own making. If we ever get to see behind the curtain, after we’ve died, almost nothing would surprise me except anyone on earth having gotten the story right.

*

And yet, stories are the thing beyond family that I love the most. They are, personally, my only form of creative redemption. If a story is both good and honest, craft can make it sublime, and beyond tending my private gardens, this is essentially all I strive for. At age 40, what I require most, and what I wish for myself, is discipline in the pursuit of this goal. Work harder. Sleep better. Eat less. Exercise more. Find whatever balance it takes to let the mind flourish.

The enemy of everything is fear. I think of the FDR quote, "there is nothing to fear but fear itself," and then finish it almost unconsciously: "but fear is a pretty good thing to fear." Death is at the center of all fear, and the acceptance of death—the internalizing of the idea that it's okay if I die, that in the end it will all be okay, okay, okay—is something I'll pursue forever with only a remote chance of grasping. But living a full life and modeling a full life can only be accomplished with the fear contained, accepted, and that's as good a goal as any for the next ten years.

Let it come, let it wash over me, let it engulf me, and flow on. We are only as real as we imagine ourselves, only as real as we want to be. The action we take—and nothing else—is who we are. The only birds that eat are the ones we feed.