THIS IS FORTY meant dropping into a yoga class with one of the best teachers I know. The mirror gave me a lovely view of all of my flaws, and all of my misses, all of the reasons why I’m a loser. I didn’t even have contacts in, a true blessing that my vision wasn’t sharper to see even more.
Not even halfway through the class, our teacher told us to stop talking shit to our reflections, and to turn around and face the wall. I didn’t realize how tightly clenched my jaw was, my back was, my emotions were until I stopped staring.
I went to bed last night, expecting to wake up to THIS IS FORTY. Instead, I woke up to my mundane life that is THIS IS THIRTY NINE but one day later. The sore muscles from sleeping on something at a funny angle, the relief I knew that would be coming by clicking on the coffee pot, the excitement in my daughters voice as she told me what the tooth fairy had left for her in the night.
It’s easy to stop at a pivotal moment, like a big birthday, and look back and see hard times, and quickly look ahead to the open hearted future that’s bright and sunny. It’s like an exclusive-to-you version of New Years Day. It’s assumed that everything in the past is something to work out of, things to get better about. Good vibes ahead and all that.
News flash, in case you are also today years old and learning this, like me. It doesn’t get better. I mean, it does in some ways. Some ways it doesn’t. If all of our THIS IS proclamations came true, we still wouldn’t be dealing with our shit. We’d also miss out on a lot of wonderful, ordinary and not so ordinary moments that make life joyful. There is no drawn line between remembering the past and leaving it all behind while forging ahead. It’s a mash up of everything, out of order.
I hate feeling heartbeats. My kids like to freak me out by grabbing my hand at random moments and placing it on their chests. They find this extremely funny and I find it extremely creepy and anxiety producing. If Mr. TDH (that’s future Mr. Tall Dark and Handsome) tells me he loves it when I rest my head on his chest, I’ll go into the maybe-we’re-not-soulmates-after-all speech.
Anyway, as we finished our yoga practice, and I was thinking about how THIS IS FORTY is really just THIS IS LIFE and a Tuesday, our teacher encouraged us to place our hands on our hearts. Normally I’d ignore this, defiantly putting my hands anywhere else.
I know my heart is broken in lots of ways and for lots of reasons. Everyone’s is. I let myself feel it beat tonight, knowing it’s been giving me life for forty years today, knowing it’s been stressed emotionally and physically, especially as of late.
I couldn’t help but cry, and it was a good moment in which to do so because when the room heated to one hundred degrees, it’s so easy to “wipe the sweat” with a towel. Highly recommend.
As Andra Day’s voice filled my ears, I gave my heart a tiny prayer of encouragement and hoped that I, too, will continue to rise up for more THIS IS days to see what ordinary chaos is created from the blurred line between nostalgia and forward-looking naive hopefulness.
THIS is forty.