Aaccording to conducted research According to Stanford Medical University in 2024, adults are subject to two “massive biomolecular shifts”—in other words, leaps of aging—one at 44 and another at 60, confirming what most of us instinctively know: we age in sharp leaps rather than smooth, steady progress. As the new year annually invites us to take stock, I keep thinking about where we could place equivalent emotional anchor points, those periods in which after many years – God willing! – hobbling around, feeling about the same thing, suddenly one day a change occurs.
I bring this up because I seem to be in the middle of one of them, a tipping point that manifests itself in how many times on the way back from the school stop I stop to look at a bird in a tree, or a snail on a wall, or any number of other overwrought visual metaphors that allow me to momentarily feel like I'm inside a poem written Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is difficult to understand what is happening, but it is connected with the feeling of the end, which, if sad, is not sad; rather, it falls into that category of sadness that I consider a foretaste of future nostalgia.
These feelings of transition are largely driven by external factors (in my case, this is my children's final year of primary school), but they are also obviously influenced by cultural factors. I turned 50 at the end of November, which at any age before ours would have placed me comfortably on the other side of a full-blown midlife crisis. But in an era where 50-year-olds still dress exactly the same as they did 20 years ago—as if they were going to skateboard to work—everything has been pushed back a decade. And now I am in a stage that I call the tree-gazing phase, which last occurred to me with such intensity in the early 30s, and before that, in my teens.
This seems right, doesn't it? Three important turning points in life when a person is briefly but acutely aware of the passage of time, and which, in my experience, tend to be reached in even-numbered years (I've always preferred the lower pressure of odd-numbered ages for this reason). There is this line from The Underworld of Don DeLillo in which he remarks of a couple working out on treadmills: “They were training to live forever” – and it is the breaking of this delusion that opens up these mind-blowing periods. In other words, I'm doing what everyone does as they age, which is to assume that they are the first people in history to experience what people have experienced since the beginning of time – in this case: hints of mortality. (See also: childbirth.)
By the way, kids don't like it when their parents go into this mode, partly because, at least in my case, it triggers observations like: “It's weird to think that one day our cats will die and we'll be so sad”; and partly because it forces them to face the terrifying possibility that their parents' inner lives are as real and awkward as their own. Another thing about these turning points is that they are inevitable. When it came to big, life-changing events, I was able to occasionally find ways to cheat the impact by feeling the feelings beforehand, at a lower temperature, and then getting through the actual event relatively unscathed.
I managed to do this last year when I moved to another country after turning 17, and most of my grief was dealt with in advance, gradually, so that I was overwhelmed only twice: once when I last left the school my children had attended since kindergarten – and, to my utter amazement, almost panicked at the extent of the grief. And the second time, spontaneously bursting into tears from the horror of goodbye, I was so busy thinking about it – I forgot to consider how it would actually be.
In contrast, these more general periods of change don't work that way, and I'm guessing there's no hack to help us get around them. Anyway, why do we need this? There is such a thing: director and actor Lena Dunham I said that sometimes it's nice – or in this case – to feel what you're supposed to feel at the time you're supposed to feel it. I feel it now, like the harmony of time. Looking forward, I wonder how this period of my life will appear in retrospect, just as when I look back on last year, it appears in my memory as if through deep water. It seems like it happened decades ago.
