40

So what do you do when you have two incompatible ideas in your head, and they both have that special gravitational force of being powerfully true? We've got all kinds of theories, from cognitive dissonance to dual-processing, but the matter is far from settled.

People live by symbols, and also by experience. Some rites of passage are experiential, like taking one's first step, and others are symbolic, like turning eighteen and becoming an adult in the eyes of the law. At the end of today, I'll hit one of the symbolic ones. This is the last day of my thirties, and tomorrow is the first day of my forties.

Forty isn't old; I don't have the slightest qualm about saying that. But I'm firm in my conviction that forty is no longer young. Teenagers are clearly young. People in their twenties are young adults. Even people in their thirties have lost only the outer layer of newness. But by forty, I've left being "young" behind by almost any reasonable measure.

The "almost" is in that last sentence because I don't feel "no longer young." I've always felt as though the conventional associations with my numerical age didn't quite fit; I felt like a young 30, a young 35, a young 39. Because I'm an academic, I get to indulge my eccentricities and approach a lot of my daily work very playfully, and because I deal with people in their late teens and early twenties, I get to soak up a lot of the enthusiasm and fun that they radiate like little quasars.

But it does feel as though something is changing.

Now, don't get the idea that I feel gloomy or depressed about turning forty. That's not it. But it has hovered in the dead center of my attention for the past few days, and out near the periphery of my attention for most of the past year. Forty has always felt as though it was going to mean something, as though something was going to change. Between those two statements, meaning and change, I think meaning is far more likely, since it is symbolic, rather than experiential. But it might turn out to bring change as well.

What I half-expect to happen is that mortality will become more real.

I know that I'm not going to live forever. I've known it since I was a very young toddler. But knowledge can be superficial or deeply internalized. Small children can repeat back the definition of death, and even paraphrase it back to show that they comprehend it, but it isn't entirely real to them so long as their world is half-pretend. And the idea that knowledge moves from symbol to a pattern of experience is something I've taught a whole lot of first-year students as they arrived on campus. I tell them a story of a gruesome accident that I almost had while driving on a rainy night, and how it took the dangerous and potentially fatal nature of driving from my conceptual knowledge to my lived experience, and made me a much safer driver. I tell them their awareness of the difficulty of college and the necessity of working responsibly and with discipline is only conceptual, but will have to become experiential if they want to survive. And I say all that to say that I think my awareness of the end of life is about to move another big monster step away from the conceptual and toward the experiential.

What's puzzling is how passing a purely symbolic milestone is supposed to accomplish that. Couldn't tell you. Beyond that, I'm not sure what changes will come with it. I have started to think across the span of what I've done to date and to weigh it, measure it, evaluate it. Is it enough? Have I used my years well? How much can I do with the years ahead? I don't regard them as scarce, but neither are they infinite. What in my life is wasteful? What areas of my life are about to fall out of my complacency and start to demand careful arrangement?

Age is just a number, and my rational faculties tell me it's silly to dwell on July 15, 2009, because it's unlikely to be categorically different from the 16th or the 14th. There's genuinely not a reason to perceive the crossing of a boundary there, because that transition is continuous, not stair-stepped. But the symbol is powerful, and it's working on me, and what that work turns out to be is something I'll have to wait and see.

Program note: I'm not, by any means, done with abortion thoughts. Those got shoved aside as I put more hours into getting my summer online classes ready to go, but I have several more to post. I imagine that'll be the last half of July.