Turning 40

All those years back in mid-2000s, when I was still learning to deal with living away from my parental home for the first time in my life, while handling all the newfound independence to eat/sleep/drink/roam/laze whenever or however I wanted to and generally learning how to live by myself, I got bitten by the blogging bug. Blogging was the exciting thing back then, and the new web (or Web 2.0) as it was called then, had this layer of interaction and communication built on top of it that caught the attention of people around the world, young and old, and inspired them to start “creating content” in blogspace, social media (or whatever its avatar was during those days), or even within snarly “discussion” boards where the newly minted web media editors naively believed that they could solicit public feedback on their media and use it to improve their content — little did they know about how unshackled human minds, and thereby human civility, becomes when provided a guise of anonymity. Truly, those discussion boards were the birthing places of first online trolls, and probably also of those epic “most liked” youtube comments.

Anyway, I took upon blogging because I did feel that I could do something with my love for language, literary humor, and talk about the issues of the time plaguing my young mind. I wrote about everything from politics, break-ups, self-commentary, travelogues, nature of art, current affairs, etc. I also had a somewhat decent output, and I did spend a lot of time on crafting my narrative and chiseling my words. For a while, I did FEEL like writer, and even though no one noticed (or even derided) me except a few friends (which was fair because I never tried to publish anything formally in any case), I still felt content about the fact that I could write about something from start to finish, and hopefully make a few good points along the way. This period of self-expression in my life lasted from 2007–2009, which was also a time of emotional and professional upheavals, and so it was advantageous to have a channel to express myself. In the next few years, up until 2014, I also dabbled in Hindi/Urdu and occasional English poetry. This was mostly due to a great appreciation that I have always had for poetry, and thus the desire for imitation, however talentless that might be! OF course, my dwindling article output too contributed to that. Unlike a long time that it took to conceive of, write, and edit an article, poems were a bit easier to write because those just “flowed” and I could also hide behind abstraction without a need to establish the point being made. The wordsmithing involved was no lesser though. Unlike the political/satirical nature of my English articles, the poetry, as can expected, was deeply personal, and it did give me an ability to convey something without conveying it verbatim, and that was a relief.

In the years that followed, I got busier with life and the professional and personal responsibilities and though I never gave up on the dream that I will write again someday, I actually never did, unless you count emails as “write-ups”! To be honest, I generally gave up on writing because I got too busy in pursuits that took less of time and effort and gave a more “instant gratification” of sorts. Also, I realized that the lesser I wrote, the more I thought about things than can be written about. I made numerous idea notes, and spent many a evenings ruminating on what is worth writing about. Expectedly, mental fatigue set in, and nothing materialized beyond a few sentences.

So how am I here now? Well, I turned 40 recently. So how does that connect to writing? Well, I thought this was an opportune occasion to revisit a blog that I wrote when I turned 25. I was pretty proud of that post at the time, and I still am in a way. However, the kind of dramatic language that I used, apparently to humor the reader, and an attempt at wisdom on the journey thus far and the foreboding that I conveyed for the life ahead made me cringe a bit. Well, cringe is a bit of a good thing because if I agree with what my 25-year-old self was thinking about, where is the growth per se? Anyway, one interesting thing that did catch my eye in that post was the concept of dreams of what you want to be in life, and how a distant target makes you put off the planning needed to achieve those dreams. In effect, my 25-year-old self lamented about dreams from my childhood about who I was going to be when I grew up, and when I did “grow up” (read, turned 25), I wasn’t even close to achieving any of many that I had envisioned. Of course, your childhood dreams do get shaped or even replaced based on your circumstances and experiences growing up, and so the place where I had landed at that age in life wasn’t something totally unexpected or even unwanted. However, in this age, at 40, having some of the very same “dreams” (however evolved those may be from the time) as unfulfilled does make me wonder if I really understood what those dreams were and whether I was prepared to put in the work needed to realize those, especially when I had the time, energy and circumstances to do so. Or maybe, having unfulfilled dreams is the key towards desire and the general zest for life? I wonder indeed.

So, what thoughts do I have on this birthday? Same person, who chose to record his thoughts back then and is doing so again now, and thus it does create a narrative about the passage of time and its effects on me, to anyone interested in knowing. Well, for starters, I still have a sense of perspective on the time gone by and the time left, just like I had back in the day. Also, I continue to think that options of who you can be do get narrower as you age, given the constraints on time and the general brain fatigue that starts presenting itself as you age and which can no longer be hidden by all the energy you have as a younger person. But what is truly different at the age of 40 is the sense of helplessness for what lies ahead, and an inevitability of loss. That you are crossing the boundaries of irreversible changes in you body, your perspective and your relationships. There is also a realization that your life will not center around just you anymore. Finally, there is little to no desire for any new relationships in life, because you are too weary of the work it takes to build those and you have seen how easily those are lost — basically keep what you have close to you and put all the “work” into maintaining and cherishing those.

Those the truths.

Well, what are the lessons on the journey so far then? To begin with, the very fact that you’ve had a journey is something to be very proud of. There is gratitude towards that and the chances you’ve been offered because you’ve seen many journeys falter or derail, or even fail to start. Secondly, there is an acknowledgement of memory being a fickle thing and that forgetting details of your everyday misery goes a long way in keeping you sane — sometimes this also breeds a false sense of nostalgia as certain periods of life seem much better than they actually were, but that is a bearable side effect. Lastly, there is a certain sense of relief in financial wellness that you achieve at this juncture in your life, and while it is not guaranteed for everyone, people in all walks of life can attest to the fact that you tend to have more dough at 40 than you had in your 20s.

How about the plans then? In writing this piece, I have overcome almost a decade of writing block, and given how much I have liked doing this, I hope to keep it going. My wit and observation-power may be at a near zero level now, and I would have surely seemed self-absorbed to a fault here, but hopefully I can explore some other facet of my writing in this phase of my life! I hope to inculcate deep-insertion hobbies and quit the whole trying-it-out-before-buying-it attitude towards interests. I also hope that I develop fortitude for the personal experiences I’m going to have in this decade of my life, which will inevitably be completely alien to what I have seen and been through so far.

Au revoir, and let’s see what this fifth decade brings!