A Ramble In Time

I am still months away from being 40, ladies.

a portrait of Willem de Kooning by his wife Elaine

The worst thing you can do in life is wish that time would pass faster.

We all do it, though. People being tortured by the Taliban do it, and, fair enough, but people do it when they’re sad. They do it when they’re feeling ill. People do it when they’re excited for something. People do it on a train in the rain with a fox in a box. And it’s only forgivable in a cosmic sense because wishes don’t come true.

Time is the one thing we can’t get back.

I’ve done this “fast forward” shit my whole life. I wanted preschool to end, I wanted summer to begin, I wanted in 3rd grade to skip ahead to 5th grade because that’s when I for some reason thought I’d be able to get my first french kiss. And this to say nothing of the low-level desire for time to pass when you are a child so that you can buy cigarettes and go into R-rated films and drink beer.

And then you’re in college and though the beer you’re drinking might be illegal you have great access to it and you’re kissing as much as you want and you’re living the best life, but of course that isn’t what you think. You do not think “this is my best life! I will look back on my hasty graduation with regret!” You think, “My life will be better when I get out of here, so I can go start my wonderful life as the rock star astronaut.”

And then that doesn’t happen but you get some job at the bottom of the rung and you wish “one day I’ll be promoted and I’ll climb the ladder and get to that good place!” So you wish that you could fast forward to it, to this life that you have in your brain established as the destination. Everything that happens before that is a transitory thing.

And all of this goes on and on and it makes perfect sense in the moment, but then one day you look around and, whoopsidaisies, you’re old.

I had a therapist once who used to always tell me that I didn’t treat my life with enough urgency, whether it be in my career or my personal life. And his favored metaphor was that he would tell me every few months about the female patients he had who would put off having children and then one day in their mid-40s say “holy shit I have to have them fast” or “oh dammit I can’t have them at all.” And my trite response was always, “sure, that sounds unfortunate for them, but I’m a man.” Of course the thing about metaphors is sometimes they apply to situations that aren’t literally the exact same.

I’m going to be 40 in a few months. And I have observed the most remarkable thing in my brain that happened in my late 30s. At some point I flipped. For my entire adult life I had been irrationally confident that everything would work out — that I’d end up interred in a mausoleum with reserved spots for my children and wife and dogs and maybe a well-liked falcon or two. And then sometime around 37 or 38 the channel changed and the new voice said: “Ah well, you waited too long to sort it out, so that’s that. You fucked up your life and you’ll die alone in a ditch covered in piss.” Intellectually I know this is absurd. The difference between being 36 and 39 is not big. But it doesn’t change the reality of the thought.

I don’t think there was a single moment when it flipped. It was more like accumulation. My skin stopped healing the way it used to. I got out of shape and then fat and then the fat wouldn’t come off the way it always had before, and I stopped finding myself attractive, which is a stupid thing to say out loud but is a real thing to lose. I looked around and realized I was no longer in a world I understood. When you’re young and you wish yourself into the future, you assume the future is *yours* — a place that was built for you, where you’ll be the main character. Nobody tells you that the future shows up and belongs to someone else. You’re just in it.

I lost a career and a whole social world a few years ago in a way that felt very sudden, and I spent a long time being furious about it. I still am some days. But the honest version is that I had spent years building something while also always looking past it, wishing I was further along, waiting for the real thing to start. And then it was gone, and I realized that might have been the real thing. I just wasn’t paying attention because I was so sure something better was coming.

Which brings me back to my therapist and those women who wanted children. He wasn’t telling me to hurry up and have kids. He was telling me to stop living in a hypothetical. And I didn’t listen, because I was 28 and hypotheticals were all I had and they were beautiful.

Figuring it out and fixing it are not the same thing: the young voice that said “it’ll all work out, life starts later” and the current voice that says “you blew it, it’s already over” are the same voice. They sound completely different but they’re doing the same job. Both of them let me off the hook for being here, right now, in the only moment I actually have. One says I don’t need to try yet. The other says there’s no point in me trying anymore. And neither one requires I do a goddamn thing today.

I have spent nearly 40 years being everywhere except where I am. I don’t know how to stop doing that. But I think noticing it might be the thing that’s different about 40 — not that you’re old, not that it’s too late, but that you’ve finally run out of future to hide in.