My Birthday

With turning 50 being a bit of milestone, I decided that maybe I should do some reflecting on what I learned during my forties.

The first thing I figured out in my forties is that people who complain about turning thirty deserve to be shot. Not killed, mind you. Just shot with a pellet gun in the fleshy part of the thigh. If they are going to be whining anyway, society might as well give them something legitimate to whine about.

I'm a little more forgiving toward people turning forty. I'm willing to let them off with a simple warning that their forties are going to fly by even faster than their thirties did. I'm not exactly thrilled about turning fifty, but I've had good friends who weren't fortunate enough to live this long, so complaining about getting old seems a bit disrespectful.

I learned in my forties, that if you can't dunk a basketball in your twenties, it's not going to happen. And that somehow as the years pass, your 40 yard dash time becomes the same as your 100 yard dash time when you were 18. Also, the idea of having a four man, 100 yard relay event in the Olympics has started making a lot more sense to me.

I have come to embrace a broader definition of what constitutes exercise, too. I now count things like yard work, house work, walking the dogs, getting the mail, going to refrigerator for a beer.... One day, I actually rationalized that I didn't need to go to the gym that day because I had vacuumed. That may have been the day it finally dawned on me that I am an adult.

I learned that "coolness" has a shelf life. You reach an age where it is no longer physically possible to be cool, and that even if some younger person refers to you as cool, what they really mean is that you are a lot less uncool than they expected you to be. Fortunately, I learned shortly thereafter that "coolness" is overrated.

I think the oddest thing about my forties was it was the decade when I realized that more people I met were younger than me than older than me.

In my forties, I saw the truth in what Ingrid Bergman meant by the statement, "Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get."

Finally, I figured out that just being happy to be here isn't setting the bar too low.