Halfway there
I turned thirty-nine the other day. That means I’m almost forty.
For a long time, I had a list of things that I wanted to have accomplished by
the time I was forty. Some of those things have been achieved, others not. Forty
was the age I had in mind for when I would have reached a level of composure
and integrity that I considered noble. I’m not sure where I stand. I haven’t
even opened that list to see where my last aims at perfection might be in the
last year before the pinnacle moment arrives. That doesn’t mean I’ve given up
on trying to improve myself. It’s a life-long process. I guess I see more that
it’s hard to set temporal targets on inner growth. It might be useful as a
motivator, but we can never ensure that we reach those goals because there’s
more to personal transformation than the will to achieve it: there are also the
obstacles in the way, and the Grace that dictates when our hearts can be opened
from ‘above’.
But getting close to forty is also a nice reminder of my
mortality. Statistically, I’m nearing the middle of my life. When young, one seems
to think that life is eternal, or at least that death is so far away. Death is
an inevitability, and the older one gets the more real that becomes. This truth
used to frighten me to the core, hence another reason I turned a blind eye to
my destiny. Now, I am more at ease with it, perhaps a sign that in fact I have shifted
something within.