Reflections on Reaching the Age of 40
By Leonard Wibberley
First Published April 1955
4/9/2017
The other day, to my surprise, I turned 40 years of age.
It is a very gratifying experience, for at 40 a man is reckoned to be of some stability and his opinion of some worth. Until then, it seems to me, he is constantly and unsuccessfully striving to gain a little attention for himself amid the clamor of the world around.
Nobody listens with any depth of attention to the views of a man of 20. He may be fresh from the most stirring of experiences, may have witnessed some historic event which will affect the future of the world for generations.
He will be tolerated while he relates what he saw and heard. But once he leaves the field of pure eyewitness reporting and wanders into the adjacent territory of expressing an opinion his audience will smile.
How can a 20-year-old “boy” who has witnessed the sack of Rome have any opinion on it? That is the attitude of his hearers and I have suffered long from it. So indeed have all those who served that apprenticeship of living which culminates in being discharged as journeymen in life on reaching 40.
It must be confessed, however, that my opinions at 40 are infinitely inferior to what they were at, say, the age of 10. Then I had definite views upon all subjects and was quick to bring them forward. The world was not a puzzling place at all, for I could choose quickly between two paths and scorned all compromise.
For instance, at 10, or thereabouts, as a result of listening to my elders, I formed the firm opinion that most people spent half their lives doing things they were going to regret and the other half regretting the things they had done. I firmly decided that, come what may, I would regret no single action, word or thought on my part.
But 40 has brought a change. Now I concentrate on not doing anything that I am likely to regret. It is a negative approach and robs living of much zest. For zest is substituted comfort, to be sure. Yet there remains the nagging truth that comfort is more suitable to caterpillars than men, and had Francis Drake been devoted to comfort he would never have had the delight of hanging one of his in-laws on his voyage around the world.
This forty-ish addiction to comfort accounts for my being at present in Southern California instead of in Bangkok, Siam.
Alas, I believe I could get together sufficient to make the trip, but I am still pampering my flowers in Hermosa Beach. The self of 20 which tossed a coin to decide whether to go to Ceylon, Malaya or the West Indies looks at the self of 40 and clucks an impatient tongue.
“That I should have come to this,” says the younger self, “a house-owning, tax-paying citizen, cautious of the ocean’s temperature on a blazing day in May.”
Well, come to it I have, and as I said, it is not without its compensations. One, already referred to, is in the matter of expressing an opinion. My twenty-ish neighbor just returned from the Pacific and must sit quietly by while I tell him what is to be the future of Korea and Formosa. He knows that I have never been there, but that is of no account. My passport has 40 stamped upon it and so I am an authority upon all lands.
Again, at 40 the frantic struggle to achieve a place in the world is over. For 20 years I, and all other forty-ites and over, spent hours, days, weeks and months worrying about impressing others, achieving goals and getting a hearing for one’s point of view.
Now, I am happy to say, none of these activities bother me much. Every morning I sit at my desk to work. But I am not overly concerned as to how the fruit of my labor will be received. The work is done as best I can do it and there is an end to it. If others like it or they do not, I shall be neither greatly elated nor greatly depressed.
With the scurry gone I find now that there is much more savor to living. It is rather as if one had been engaged in a cross-country run, setting out briskly and with the greatest vigor and determination to be the first one home. But in the course of the race interest developed in the scenery around so that winning became of secondary importance.
I, as the runner, am sitting in the shade of a beech tree, munching on a ham sandwich and enjoying the carpet of light and dark made by the sunlight coming through the branches. I couldn’t care less who wins the race.
Forty is beyond cavil, a pleasant time of life. It would be a lot pleasanter if that cursed 20-year-old self would not keep talking of a tropical island where he once ate a mess of sea turtle eggs, or a schooner called the Mona Marie doing 12 knots before the trade wind and bound for Demerara, or a wild ride at midnight, undertaken for the adventure of the thing on a mare called MacBeth’s Bride.
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