Middle son turns 13 today. If you’ve ever had one, you know 13-year-old boys are positively horrible. Hormones cause emotional tsunami-like destruction while the once lovely child breaks apart and a man emerges. Ick, it’s going to be really horrible. But that’s not the lesson for this post.
This Lesson from 40Something comes from the speed in which we’ve reached this milestone birthday. The where-did-the-time-go notion goes back a long long way so I’ll not beat that dead horse. Where the time went isn’t really the issue. It’s not the time behind me that I concern myself with the speed of-it’s the time ahead. If these 13 years have passed so quickly, it stands to reason that the next 13 will also be quick. Because my oldest will soon be 21, I’ve long ago learned how brief the time is that your children are with you as children. I realized then that my life post-kids could be considerably longer than the time with them.
My concern now and my Lesson is how to slow down what’s ahead of me.
I remember when I was getting married and I wanted to make certain I walked down the aisle slowly and very much in the moment. I wanted to be able to see everyone, remember them, feel their support and love and really be in the experience. It was a time I didn’t want to have as a blur; I wanted to remember it and really enjoy the event of it all. As more time has passed, I realize that there are more and more of those moments where I want to be fully present. I see that as an opportunity to slow things down.
Technology was supposed to make our lives easier. In some ways it has, in others it has become so much of a distraction that it doesn’t allow us to fully appreciate or experience anything. Multi-tasking has made us incapable of focusing our attention. Somehow doing only one thing at a time feels lazy.
I’m determined to live differently as a 40Something. I want to make certain that at 50Something, I don’t feel like my 40s were a blur. Somehow I think this might just be the time to which I will someday poetically and romantically refer to as the good ole days. I don’t want to miss them.
We’ve all eaten lunch in our car so quickly that we barely tasted the food. I don’t want to miss the taste of the next decade. All three of my kids will have amazing things happening in the next few years and I don’t want to be caught up in the details of it so much that I miss the experience.
So the Lesson from 40Something is to slow our walk down the aisle. Take the time to look around and enjoy the faces looking back at you and live in the moment. Not every moment. Not every moment is worth that kind of effort. But at 40Something, you should be able to recognize the ones that are. Remember, we can’t do anything but wonder what happened to the time that has passed. For today though, we can make sure we focus on something to appreciate, something to mark the passing of this day, making it unlike any other. I believe if we can stack up a few of those marked moments, we’ll have made sure that looking back 13 years from now, we’ll have a better idea of where that time has not gone, but has been lived.
Lessons from 40 Something 