“That’s that and…” said my dentist, stepping back and snapping his surgical gloves away, “you now have the freedom to be foolish.” He had just extracted the last two of my wisdom teeth and I was certain neither the procedure nor the joke was new to him. Yet, as I got off the chair and tottered around a bit, the idea of being free to be foolish sounded like a terribly fun thing. Surely there is nothing more liberating than letting go of caution, logic and reason? And even though I had gone to the dentist feeling the miserable pangs of yet another attempt by my ageing body to let me down, I walked out of there with a distinct, if misplaced, sense of triumph.
In June this year, traumatically, I turned 40. Although I’d been expecting this travesty for at least a couple of years, and actively planning for the day for about six months, when my birthday did roll along I was aghast. I had decided to spend it in Spain, walking alone along the ancient pilgrim route of the Camino de Santiago. I had spent nine days on the trail, trekking a minimum of 25km a day, past woodland and highland, ancient villages and small cities. On the 10th day, after 15km of a steadily uphill walk, it was when I stood on a cliff-like mountain and spotted the Atlantic Ocean shimmering blue in the horizon that I realised it was actually my birthday. The walk was entirely downhill from there. By the time I reached the seaside hamlet of Cee, my home for the night, the thought that I was 40 was pounding so heavily in my head that I had worked myself into a brutal rage.
I was infuriated at a universe that would force me, despite my fabulousness, to be 40. It was unfair, I thought, surely I deserved better. Yes, everyone around me was always reassuring me that ‘40 is the new 30’. That is foolish. Thirty has the hint of hope. Forty, truly, is the beginning of the end. At 40, there is pretty much no chance of you being ‘the youngest person’ to accomplish anything. At 40, instead of dreaming of winning an Oscar or a Booker, you are reduced to wondering what you were doing when someone won an Oscar or a Booker. At 40, you have been alive for too many things too distant in the past that when people talk about having read something in a book — about the Emergency or the Berlin wall — you have to bite your tongue from saying you were around, actually physically around, when ‘history’ was being made. At 40, you are too tied in to who you are and what you have made and what you know you’ll never make.
In the months since I’ve returned from Spain, I’ve been simmering in these injustices of ageing, the new silver strands that are routinely popping up at my temples, of having to stretch my arm and hold my phone far in order to read a text message and the absolute inability to remember and use ‘swag’ properly in a sentence.
By the time I get home from the dentist’s I have received news that my brother has just become the father of a baby girl. I share this with my daughter, a person who is so excited to turn 10 next month that she has spent the last 200 days talking about it. She immediately does the math and tells me, “Can you believe that when the baby becomes my age, I will be 20! And she’ll tell all her friends that I am her hero.”
“And what would you be up to when you’re 20?” I ask.
“Of course I would be training to be a chef and going to veterinary college in the evenings and acting in musicals on the weekends,” she said.
It is then that I am reminded of the dentist’s words. Perhaps I don’t entirely have the freedom to be foolish, but at 40 I certainly have freedom from my own ambitions. There is no need to rush through anything, it’s already too late. Any accomplishment from here on is a bonus. Forty, I suppose, is the reward for carrying the burden of dreams and expectations for a really long time.
Where would I be, I wonder, when my niece turns 10 and my daughter 20? Sitting down, I suppose, not having to catch my breath, reading a book maybe and not having to worry if it’s too early in the day to pour a glass of wine to go with it. Writing a little, I imagine, not for a deadline, but for the sheer joy it brings. It is, come to think of it, liberating to think of 40 as the doorway to 50, where neither illusion nor delusion has much of a place. No ambition. No pressure. It’s not the Technicolor production one expects life to be. But it has the lived-in comfort of reality.
Veena Venugopal is editor BLink and author of The Mother-in-Law; @veenavenugopal