When you’re 18, you think life goes on forever. At 40, you realize time moves.
An urgency sets in to do your best work, to get to the kernel of your life. To decide what you are all about, and to work on that exclusively. To give the world that which is most you. The most beauty you have inside yourself, that is what you want to work on, to polish it and give it to the world. Everything else fades away. Like the stone falling from the block, revealing David, you want your extra stone to fall away, leaving but the most beautiful sculpture.
This is what it is to turn 40.
A time of reflection.
Many want to go back and live again their lost youth. But I lived good then. I wouldn’t want to change it, though I had some setbacks and wasted years, because it made the man writing here today. And I love this man. I love my family. My power, my passions, my abilities. My light.
This is what I want to shine through.
A Note on Ageing
People don’t want to age because they never invested in themselves, thus they never grow or improve as they get older. They are but children in an old person’s body. Thus the endless focus on youth in our modern times.
Because we never grow up. We never become anything, we never invest in ourselves and so there is nothing to become but old, and many consequently long for lost youth. When our bodies were young and fit, when our cares were less.
Many people will tell you that youth is the best time in your life. And it is certainly thrilling. There is a simple beauty to being a boy and then a young man. The weight of life is not yet upon you.
But there is more beauty in growing older…because you grow. One who invests in themselves gets better over time. They get wiser, and carry more of the beauty of life in them. They are the ones a great society cherishes. Not the young and ignorant.