Forty turns around the sun
Ten years ago, when I turned thirty, I remember looking at the bald fact of it with something close to terror. It wasn’t turning thirty so much that bothered me—although that was indeed a surprisingly difficult thing to get my head around—but the speed at which time had suddenly seemed to disappear.
“My twenties are gone,” I remember saying to my aunt and her then-partner. “I can’t…I can’t believe how fast they went.”
“Your thirties will go faster!” my aunt’s partner said, cheerfully. “Just you wait and see.”
Those words of his have bubbled in the back of my mind ever since. Every year, when yet another birthday came around, I would hear his voice in my head and think, there we go—another year of the thirties, gone. I heard it as a whisper from ages 30-34, and then it came roaring when I turned 35 (hello, shift into the 35-44 demographic!), and each year after that it’s been roaring ever louder.
And now, here we are. The big 4-0. Forty. I can remember when my parents were that age. My youngest sister was two. I was twelve years old, fumbling through Grade 7, hoping for freedoms and kindness in high school and wishing so desperately for love. Even though I did not yet know, at that age, what love could even look like. Even though I did not, at that age, love myself the way that I would eventually, long years later, learn to do.
If you had asked me, at twelve, what I imagined my life would look like twenty-eight years into the future, I would have told you a life that looks so very different from the life that I live now. I would have said things like I want to be married and I want at least five kids! I might have said music; I would definitely have said writing. Those things are still true. Maybe I’d even have said, wistfully, that I hoped I’d get to live in a house with hardwood floors.
I would not have said I want my heart to be broken over and over and I’ll have a soulmate best friend but by the time I turn 40 she’ll have been dead for almost three years. I would not have said in my thirties I’ll be depressed. In my thirties I’ll go so low that suicide seems practical, a good idea, a simple end to all the pain.
I would not have said that. In my eagerness and faith, I would not have believed that such a thing was possible.
The first images from the Jams Webb telescope were released earlier this month. They look like something you might find in Star Trek—which, of course, they are. They show us galaxies and nebulas in detail that’s so extraordinary it feels fantastical to me. Like something an artist might dream up. I still can’t quite wrap my head around it. But then—isn’t the idea that an artist can dream up something like this in their own head equally fantastical? Synapses that fire in your brain and move your hand and before you know it there’s a rendering on paper, in the same way that an idea becomes words on a page, becomes a story, becomes a book, becomes a movie that plays out in your head or maybe, if you’re lucky, a movie that plays out on an actual screen. All of this from nothing.
Sometimes—more often than not these days, if I’m honest—that’s what life feels like to me. All of this from nothing—not in the divine creation sense, but in the sense that you can have dreams and ideas for yourself when you are twelve and then, twenty-eight years later, your life has held so much and seen so much and done so much that it really does feel as fantastical as an artist drawing a nebula that looks just like the nebulas we eventually find out in space. How anything you can imagine might be possible, and how even the things that you can’t conceive of might be possible too.
I hadn’t conceived of the sadness that would dog me through my thirties. And yet, there it was. When I turned thirty-seven I remember struggling so hard with it, with this sense that the doors in the hallway of my life had begun to shut softly but irrevocably, dreams and possibilities that I’d imagined for myself inexorably turning their faces away. You have more time, I told myself. There are still so many possibilities ahead. I knew that and yet I didn’t know that, and losing Jess a few months after this certainly didn’t help. All of the possibilities of that friendship, gone. All of our futures, gone. All of our possibilities whittled down to nothing. And suddenly the sadness of my thirties—a sinking that felt momentus each time, I can’t possibly go any lower than this—went even deeper, a vicious well of grief. Like staring out into space and seeing nothing.
But. As it turns out, when you stare out into space, there is so much more than nothing staring back at you.
In the fall of 2020 I went to a friend’s (outdoor, COVID-conscious) wedding in Toronto. I took the GO train there and back. It was the first wedding I’d attended since Jess got married in April of 2016, and being there was so lovely and yet brought back so many memories of that other wedding. (Jess’s wedding was the last time that I saw her alive in person. She was diagnosed six months after she got married and the next three years were a flurry of treatments and remission and surgeries and then, inevitably, the cancer’s return.) I rode the GO train back to Hamilton and cried the whole way home.
I can’t do this anymore, I remember thinking. I can’t do this alone.
Nothing happened to me that day, and nothing happened in the long days after that. Grief has its own timeline, its own way with you. It is, as Elizabeth Gilbert has talked about, a carve-out. It will do with you whatever it wants. And it continued (continues!) to do whatever it wanted with me for most of the year that followed. Thirty-seven ticked over into thirty-eight, and thirty-eight became thirty-nine. And then, in October of 2021, almost a year to the day of those moments on the GO train, something happened.
I find it a little difficult to speak of these things because I know they aren’t always to everyone’s comfort level. All these questions of belief and wildness and the magic of the universe, the magic of the world. Suffice to say that in October of 2021, something happened to me which very quickly became a spiritual experience—the kind of experience that re-orients you, re-organizes your thinking, makes you see the world as though you have new eyes. It led me to Pema Chödrön and Thich Naht Hanh and Plum Village and the practice of mindfulness, of meditation, of using your breath to touch the universe that rests inside of you. Earlier this month, something else happened to re-affirm it, and every step I take now feels like it’s drenched in joy.
Jess lived a life filled with joy, as much as she also, particularly in the last years of her life, lived filled with grief and sadness. She was very good at relishing, at taking any and all available moments to grab for love and laughter. She wasn’t a Buddhist but her approach was very much the same. She was always present. When she ate something particularly delicious, she had this wonderful way of tossing her head back and rolling her eyes in ecstasy, of giving herself over, full-body, to the sensual experience of food. I was too afraid to do that—what if someone thought I was a fool?—but in this last almost-year, these last few months, I’ve found my own ways of relishing. The quiet joys, the endless wonders in the day.
I have another friend who once told me—she was in her early sixties at the time—that if she had the chance to be young again, she wouldn’t choose to be younger than thirty-five.
“I wouldn’t go back,” she said, and the conviction in her voice astonished me. “I started to know myself so much more after thirty-five. I wouldn’t give any of that up. It is not worth it.”
Well. I am here, on this first day of forty, to tell you that I would not go back to any age before thirty-nine. (I would take everything Jess, of course. If I could, I would go back and grab her and haul her into the future. My future, hers, our shared times together. All of it. I will never stop wanting all of that back.)
But something happened in those first few months of thirty-nine, in that year that was my fortieth, and it has kept happening. Earlier this spring I realized that I’ve been treating so much of my life like a series of impossible shores—paddle hard, Amanda, and you’ll get to the next job/book deal/milestone/whatever. If you don’t get there, you aren’t paddling hard enough. And one day this January I realized—there is no shore. There is no shore at all. My only job here is to stay in the boat and let the waves have their way, much like grief. To trust that the waves will sometimes feel insurmountable but even they will dim, with time. Because nothing—not even the waves of grief—lasts forever. And I can do that! I can imagine myself into exactly that possibility.
And now I officially have forty years behind me (hello, forty-first year of life!) and instead of fear and sadness I look around and see and feel nothing but delight. I feel surrounded by love, by grace, by grief and joy and sadness and difficulty but also magic everywhere I turn. I feel surrounded by gifts. A few nights ago I took the Dog of Doom out for a tiny walk around the block (Mindfulness is doing the dishes! Mindfulness is walking the dog!) and every step felt like a benediction. Look at these echinacea, flowering in the garden. Look at that echinacea, scrabbling for life out of a crack in the sidewalk. Feel the warmth of a heavy Hamilton summer night on your face. Smell the gardens, smell the air. Come back to your beautiful little house that you love so much and sit down on the floor and just breathe, in and out, in thankfulness.
I thought I would know more, at forty. I thought I would understand so many things. But as it turns out, understanding is the farthest thing away from me. Each day I feel that I understand less and less—and that’s okay. Instead, at forty, I feel that I love so many things. I feel drenched in this love, saturated in it, as though the well of grief and depression I was tumbling through has turned itself inside out and shown me its other, secret face. I love myself with a love that feels wild and bottomless. What an unbelievable gift.
It’s one thing to look at the stars above us and contemplate the infinite nature of the universe. It’s a whole other thing, I’ve discovered, to sit with yourself and breathe and feel that infinite nature inside of your own heart.
And so: welcome to forty. Everything is okay. Everything will be just fine, Leduc, even as it is also hard and difficult and wrenching. Just breathe it in, and breathe it out, and trust that when you breathe, you’re touching the same thing that NASA is looking at in all those pictures out in space.
If you need me, I’ll be bobbing in my boat, rocking with the waves and looking up at the stars.
This is beautiful Amanda. Thanks for sharing and welcome to your forties!
This is so wise and beautiful.