Yeah, I'm 40...and?

I have never given 40 much thought.    Not in the way I thought about 27, though my fascination with that age was pretty much about the fact that I knew it was how old I would be when the calendar flipped from 1999 to 2000.  One month later I was 28, an age I had no particular attachment to.  Two years later I turned 30 without a whole lot of fanfare (I chose to spend the day alone eating cheese on the couch and yes, it was truly awesome).  Ten years have followed since and I now find myself on the edge of 40. 

While I may not have given the age of 40 much thought it seems a lot of other folks have.  I’ve been asked multiple times how I feel about turning 40 and my answer has been that I feel the same about turning 40 as I did about turning 39: It’s my birthday, which means someone should be buying me dinner and a drink! It’s my BIRTHDAY!  Woooooo!

Yes. Yes, Jane.  We know you love your birthday.  It’s that day that’s all yours, you get to do whatever you like and people let you get away with it, blah, blah, blah. But seriously, 40 IS kind of a big deal, you had to think about it at least a little bit...

Alright, party planning and good times aside the truth is that I have thought about it some.  It is, after all, one of those milestone birthdays.  At 40 one is statistically beyond the half way point of the average American life expectancy and for most of us it means we have now been living on our own away from the shelter of our parents for longer than we lived with them.  Basically 40 means that for better or worse you are, undeniably, an adult. 

Ok, legally I’ve been adult for 22 years, ever since the day I turned 18, and I’ve lived on my own since the day I graduated high school but the me that I was at 18 and the me I am now are worlds apart.   I think most us of enter adulthood thinking we pretty much have things figured out, and perhaps if our worlds never got any bigger, if we never had a single other new experience, and if we never found ourselves in a place where our deepest core beliefs were challenged, we would have everything figured out, but life happens and twenty plus years later…well, one might find oneself writing a blog post about just how mistaken we really were.

Actually there is quite a bit about me that hasn’t changed.  I’m still a creative person who is constantly swept off her feet by ideas for new creations.  I can still lose myself for hours in writing or painting, or dance.  My favorite way to spend an evening will likely always be to surround myself with friends to share food and conversation.  I still want to taste, see, hear, smell and touch as much of the world as I can in however many years I may have left.  And yes, many of those aforementioned beliefs are still around too, the ones that have been tested and found to be worth keeping.

What has changed?  If I had to put it into bullet points it would look something like this:

Things Spinster Jane has Learned in Her 22 Years of Adulthood

• There is no one who will see the world in exactly the same way that I do, and as much as it might frustrate, annoy, and sometimes piss me off, in the end it is okay.

• Sometimes it’s best to just be quiet and listen.

• The only person I have any control over whatsoever is me.

• Life is a very temporary thing and there is nothing, no pain, no love, no grief, no joy, no loss, nor any gain that lasts forever.  I take great comfort in this.

• I am not perfect, I don’t know everything and I am quite capable of being totally, completely and utterly wrong…even about this.

(Yep, I’m saying that there was a time when I thought I knew it all, that it was possible to change just about anybody if you tried hard enough and what the rest of the world really needed was a heavy dose of my advice…)

What does all of this have to do with turning 40?  Well other than the mathematics of the look back not much.  I could have likely written a very similar post at 30 and possibly could do so again 10 or 20 years from now; I hope that I do.  I hope that at 50 or 60 I can look back and say that I’ve learned even more about the world and about myself, even if it turns out I’m wrong or mistaken about certain things, because if I can then it will mean that I’ve not stopped or stagnated, but instead continued to learn, experience, discover and grow.  And while there may or may not be a point to this experience between birth and death that we call our lives, I really don’t think it’s about the numbers.

Now…who’s taking me out to dinner?  

Wanted: Party Planner (um...maybe)

In just over two months I will be celebrating my 40^th birthday.  We humans like to mark time and perhaps because we have ten digits to count with, we like to do it in decades.   Since on average we can expect to be on this earth for about eight of full counts of these digits, forty marks the midpoint for most of us.   It is one of those ages where people look at their lives and ask if themselves, “Am I in the place I want to be?”

I have to confess to the fact that I have never really had any sort of plan.  Way back when I was preparing to graduate from high school and everyone else around me seemed to have at least a bit of a clue as to what they wanted to do, I sat down to give my future some thought and…I came up completely blank.  I truly had no idea what I might want to do or who I wanted to be.   My senior yearbook quite accurately lists my future ambition as “none.”  Since most of the adults in my life weren’t freaking out about this, I decided that panicking wasn’t necessary and stepped blindly off into the world of adulthood. 

In the intervening 32 years of experiencing the world I certainly learned a few lessons, had my share of wins and losses, found some direction and now at nearly 40 I can say I’m pretty much okay with where I am.  I am still in the process of figuring out who I am and I’m thinking it’s going to take at least another four decades to even come close to saying I’ve found myself.

Now, despite the preceding three paragraphs, this post isn’t about whether or not I am happy with my life on the edge of 40.  What this post is actually about is how I should mark my arrival at this particular milestone.  I did have a plan, a BIG plan; one that involved hot tubs in the middle of February, a photo booth and a bonfire.   However, the funds for said ambitious plan went towards emergency surgery for one of my spinster mascots.  While there is no way that I would change that and I am happy that I have many more years of kitty cuddles ahead of me, it did pretty much pull the financial legs from beneath my birthday extravaganza. 

In addition to this I also find myself busier than I have ever been at any previous point in my life.  Even if I had the funds to celebrate in the manner that I’d planned, I’m not sure I’d have the time to actually coordinate the event.  I’d be quite happy with a gathering of friends with a potluck dinner and a large assortment of cupcakes but, I’d be lucky if I managed a facebook invite a week before the party was due to be held. 

I suppose if I had a significant other it would, by default, be their job to handle the planning but since I quite happily don’t (and certainly any past beau’s I’ve had would not have been up to the task…sorry guys, but I generally was the more organized one), what I am wondering is if it is okay to ask someone, like a friend, to help with planning my 40^th birthday party?

I admit to feeling a bit strange asking for assistance with this.  I would be asking someone to help out with an event that is, after all, all about me.  Then again if I were planning any other milestone event, a wedding, graduation, birth of a child, etc., I’d probably not feel at all weird about asking for help and so maybe my hesitance in asking for assistance with this is because it is all about me and I’m worried about appearing self-centered or selfish.  Yep apparently even proud spinsters have hang-ups.

So I’m asking for your thoughts on this readers and friends.  Is it okay to ask for help in planning this event that will mark my four decades of existence on this earth?  What are your thoughts?  

Thank you…