As time moves quickly, just like our parents warned, most of us spend at least a small portion of time re-evaluating who we are, where we’ve been and what we’re going to do next.
As my peers and I circle our fortieth year, preparing to land in our fifth decade, we can’t help but reflect…not with regret…but with an educated eye, on where we’ve been and where we will go from here.
Most of us spent our twenties searching for the opposite sex, a good romance, (or if it snowballed…marriage); racking up credit card debt; forcing ourselves to stay up late and partying into the early morning to prove we still could; pumping out kids as if the tax right offs were worth it; and climbing whatever job ladder we fell into after high school, or if we were lucky, post college. We ate junk food like it would never haunt us. We bought our first homes, but wished we could afford something bigger; moved out of state because surely there is a life out there somewhere; spent all the money we should have been saving on every toy we could find because everyone else had them; and laughed off the thought of ever being old enough that social security…or lack thereof…would matter.
We factually stated we’d be millionaires by the time we were forty; wondered why our parents didn’t do things right and claimed we’d never put ourselves in that position. Things would be different for us, we said…we were smarter.
Then we hit our thirties and began to hunker down into reality. We bought a bigger home to house the hungry kids we’d created; we sold off our toys in favor of ‘something the whole family can enjoy’; discovered alcohol caused more trouble than good; wondered when was the last time we stayed up past eleven; volunteered at our kids schools in an effort to keep track of them; and finally put together enough money to take the kids on a family vacation, swearing someday we’d take a vacation without them and wouldn’t that be nice. We watched our boobs fall, our belly’s grow and our hairlines recede.
We started to listen to our elders who warned us about retirement and wished we’d started padding that bank account from birth. The reality of what’s ahead began to take shape…some of us got divorced…some of us hung on for dear life afraid of what’s out there…and some of us found that even after the sparks wore off and kids took over, we still liked our spouses.
By the time we got to forty, (hopefully) our credit debt is paid off, we’ve got a stack of numbers in a 401k because we played by all the rules; we wonder why we sunk all our money into this giant house because back in the day kids didn’t have their own bed, let alone their own room; and we wonder where the time went. We faintly recall our “millionaire by forty” fantasy we had in our twenties, and realize it is probably not going to happen. Then again, a million isn’t that much anymore, gone are the days when we could have lived off the interest in a beach front hut sucking down daiquiri’s and smoking a fat one.
Our life is comfortable. We’ve etched out an existence for ourselves and looking around we think…eh, not too bad. Could have been worse. Could have been better.
And now we look forward to the next ten years and wonder what it will bring. Have we learned from our history? Can we look back with reflection and not with regret on the decisions we made that made us who we are? Will we make and break promises to ourselves yet again this decade or will we move forward with a stamina yet unseen and forge through our forties with the stealth of our youth and the wisdom of our age to come out on top at fifty?
I guess we’ll find out eventually, because if one thing is for certain, it’s that time doesn’t stop and life must go on.
