Well, yes. It is my birthday, and I am now officially 40. So yay me.
Here is me turning 39, and you might as well read it because it’s all the cheer you’re ever going to get out of me on a birthday. I prefer disappointment. It suits me.
Still, as I reminded myself yesterday, having a birthday is better than not having one. In our headlong rush to reject all signs of age and maturity, what is the alternative? We can’t just not get older. The only other option is to leap into the arms of death and call it a day, or rather Sheol.
Rebecca West, in Black Lamb Gray Falcon describing the then current state of Diocletian’s palace, cuts to the heart. “It would be frivolous,” she writes, “to object to the adaptations the children of the palace have made to live as it would be to regret that a woman who had reared a large and glorious family had lost her girlish appearance.” I am always haunted by this. It is frivolous to regret youth and the markers of youth, but it seems like all the western world is so fixed on the beauty of youth that if you go one moment beyond it–which you have to do because of time and reality–you will have personally failed. Children have to hurry up and grow up, and adults have slow down and not age. We must all fix ourselves at the age that Kylie Jenner is now, which is a ghastly proposition when you really think about it.
I thought I would make it ok for myself to turn forty by getting “in the best shape of my life.” This shouldn’t be very hard, I reasoned, because I’ve never been in very good shape. There has only been one moment where I really had any upper body strength, any endurance beyond couple of half baked planking moments. Physical exercise is something of little or no interest to me. If I could have anything I wanted, I would sit in a chair and be brought regular and capacious meals.
So anyway, I didn’t get in shape. My birthday looming up before me on the horizon, every day I considered the proposition of Excellent Physical Health and sat down and had another piece of bread. This is why I don’t like personal goal making. The more goals I make for my own improvement, the more failure I pile up in my trudging wake as I go on to the next day. Matt calls it law making. I make a law for myself not commanded anywhere by God, I fail keep my own law, and then I’m mad at God for making me so miserable. I’m overstating it, of course, sitting around eating toast is not remotely approximating a life of misery.
So of course I’m just extending my law. For my fortieth year, I will get into the best shape of my life, or at least better shape than I am now, or maybe just slightly better shape. And I will try to be less mad at myself for looking like a normal person–a person whose body has been broken reasonably by children and hard work. And by broken I really just mean not rail thin. And also, I’m going to go see Florence Foster Jenkins, because that is a movie that has to be seen. And also, I’m going to solve the problem of the cat being angry about me moving her box. For My Birthday. #winning #awesome
Have a lovely day. And happy birthday if it’s your birthday, if you like that sort of thing.
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