THE 39 (AND A BIT) STEPS

Pretty soon people are going to start asking me how it feels to turn 40.

I think I shall say that it makes me feel sick.

Then they will look at me in a puzzled way, not knowing what to say next, and I will bumble through a sort-of answer. After all, birthdays are for the celebrating aren’t they? Get with the programme, you thirty-nine-and-nine-tenths-year-old grandad.

I feel sick, mostly for three reasons. One is that it focuses me on an unswervable truth: I haven’t achieved any of my goals; not a single one. 

You can dress it up how you like but my 20 year-old self, my 30 year-old self, and even my five year-old self are all upset with me about it. It isn’t totally misfortune, it isn’t completely circumstances or other people. It is mostly down to me though. And that thought is in sharp view as the blazing candles come out, on top of a slowly melting cake. And it makes me feel sick with disappointment.

The second reason for feeling sick (and I’m making no pretence about it) is that I’m not really 40 at all! Time sped me up in my twenties and it’s raced me here, faster and faster by the day. I’m actually 26 or 27 by my calculation, and this sham of a system (my birth certificate, driving licence, passport, the actual mirror, and the astronomical solar orbit counter) is trying to persuade me that something else has happened while I was blinking. And weirdly, we’re all going along with this gross injustice.

Reason three is because I’m afraid. When I turned 20 I slipped into a depression that looped me into a mistake. I wasn’t depressed about being 20; I was upset about something else and it clouded my judgement. When those clouds descend, the path is very hard to see.

Amazingly, the same thing happened when I was 30. I lost the path. It caused at least seven years of pain, maybe more, and maybe it influences me thinking I haven’t achieved anything. I feel like a time waster. Either way, I’m terrified that the same thing will happen again - or worse, that I’ll be so scared of that that I’ll miss the path anyway.

So I feel sick.

I don’t need to though. I can turn this around. After all, there is a lot that I have achieved, even if my heart is terribly broken about the things that I haven’t. Therefore, there is a lot to be thankful for. It probably starts there - just simple thankfulness.

As for the numbers, they don’t really mean anything: just a simple count of how many times one pebble has made its way around one ball of gas. Nothing to do with me really.

Finally, the path; stretching out beyond the milestone and into the fog. I don’t need to be afraid. I must take it one lantern-lit step at a time, I suppose. It is an adventure after all, and there is no need to fall into the ravine if I tread carefully.  What history has given me here, is a lesson: one that I didn’t have ten years ago, and couldn’t have imagined when I was 20.

So, what shall I say then when people ask me? I feel sick, yes. But I also feel thankful and hopeful. I apologise in advance if my eyes are full of tears and I drift off into a sigh - I promise you, I’m working through it and it’ll be alright.

It will have to be.