When I look back on my school years, one predominant emotion seems to overshadow all the others—impatience. I could not wait to pass my 12th standard, because the adult world seemed so much more alluring than the suffocation of boarding life. There were so many experiences to be had, so many rules to be broken. Life seemed like one big adventure waiting to happen. In hindsight, I was right and wrong. I was wrong, because I never realised that the fresh-faced novelty of childhood is something irretrievable, that once lost is lost forever. It never struck me that you can only see things for the first time once. After that, it is always a repeat performance. You don’t get a second shot at childhood.
I was right, because all those caffeine-saturated nights of studying the incomprehensible principles of trigonometry need never be re-lived. Also, the fact that outside of school, trigonometry is as useless as a vestigial organ (unless you are a John Nash in the making). It is 'Advantage Adulthood' when you consider that, to a large extent, you can choose what you want to do with your life and that obeying your parents has suddenly become optional.
But now that I am 38 and barreling into my 40s, life, it seems, has become a tad jaded. The bucket list is more half-empty than half-full. As 40 approaches, two conflicting emotions rage within me. On the one hand, I am resisting it with every ageing cell in my body. In a culture which idolises youth, the discovery of each new grey hair is a panic attack waiting to happen. Still, in another way, I am experiencing something that I’m guessing not many people do—a kind of life fatigue. If I live to the ripe old age of 80, that means only half my life has been lived. Another 40 years lie ahead of me, unspooling at the pace of a Norah Jones song. Might it not be a reasonable supposition that the second half of my life—with its promise of thicker waists and thinning hair—will be a lot less appetising than the first half?
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I told my mother about my worry that half my life still lay ahead of me. She laughed and said that for her, the opposite is true—she’s worried that so little of it is left to her. Research says that time speeds up as you grow older. In a study of 918 adults led by the psychologist Ruth Ogden, 77 per cent of the respondents agreed that Christmas seemed to arrive faster each year. As the French philosopher Paul Janet noted, “Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let anyone remember his last eight or 10 school years: it is the space of a century. Compare them with the last eight or 10 years of life: it is the space of an hour.” Time, that way, is the master deceiver. Beneath its measured pace lies an untameable wildness. The more I try to control it, the more chaotic it becomes.
I remember watching the Mandy Moore film A Walk to Remember, adapted from Nicholas Sparks’ book, as a kid. Being a sucker for romance, the first time I watched it, I was enthralled. By the third time, I had begun to notice plot holes. By the fifth time, I was ready to pull my hair out. Especially grating was the list Moore’s character makes of the things she wants to do before she dies of leukaemia. It included getting a tattoo, being in two places at once and marrying in her mother’s church. The list seemed so obviously manufactured—an emotional quicksand cooked up by Sparks to deliberately tear up gullible readers.
But now that I’m nearing 40, I have been doing some soul searching. What kind of list would I make? What do I want to do for the remaining years of my life? The older I grow, the more I am realising that, in a society that glorifies self-worth and self-fulfilment, I’d rather go counter-cultural and empty myself for others. I truly believe that it is more blessed to give than to receive. But the more I realise that, the more it strikes me how much my natural temperament is opposed to it. If a car is waiting to turn onto the main road, my natural instinct while driving is to speed up rather than give way. If my help asks for extra money to repair her home, my first response is resistance and suspicion. If an acquaintance is visiting town, the easier path is to make an excuse about my unavailability. The more inward I turn, the harder it is to marvel at the wonder of the world outside. As G.K. Chesterton said so wisely, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
The big 40 is looming large on my windscreen, whether I like it or not. The tyranny of time dictates that I cannot slow down or stop. All I can do is roll down the window and enjoy the view.
