Every year I do what I call my 40 for whatever age I’m turning. This year is 40 for 45.

For forty days, I ask myself some deep questions about what I want for the year ahead. I used to do it as a prayer exercise with Mark Batterson’s Draw the Circle prayer challenge, but for the last few years I have wanted to ask myself some deep questions about my future and where I see my life going.

So far, my forties have not been my favorite decade by a long shot. Stagnation, settling for the short stick, dissatisfaction, boredom, loss, grief, and general malaise have been my themes.

I’ve recently reflected on how my life has turned out, and I am dissatisfied and deeply regret some of my choices. However, I can see why things happened the way they have, and maybe it was the best option.

With my mother passing away, eventually I would have had to return to San Francisco, and I think that would have been a much worse situation. I would have had to leave a life I created and was invested in. There would have been a life and people that I was connected and attached to. Having to leave a life I had built and having to start over would have been awful.

Now I get to start over and rebuild my life without any connections or attachments.  I’m not deeply invested or attached to my life at the moment, because I know this ain’t it. It never was it, and it never will be it.

Home is not with the short stick

I am starting to understand why the past ten years have been so frustrating. Nothing has felt like home.  It’s been one failed experiment after another, and a constant theme of choosing the short stick.

I know this much is true: Home is not with the short stick.

San Francisco is home in the technical sense, not the emotional one. My family is here, but beyond them I feel no real connection to the city’s people or community. Life is always subject to change, but I don’t envision a thriving life here in San Francisco, so I have to explore other alternatives.

Until this year, I didn’t know that people built lives outside the places where they lived, but I’ve met several who are doing so, and that seems like the path I would like to take.

Does life really get better with time?

I talk to older people, and many say their forties were not great, and their fifties were far better. For many people, their forties may be filled with the loss of parents and marriages, raising children, dissatisfaction, or being laid off from long-term careers.

As we get older, we start to figure out what really matters to us, shed some of our conditioning and the thought processes about how we thought life should be, and just start living.

I read Tracy Bennett’s story in the Ageist newsletter, and I was inspired by it. She’s the editor of the word puzzle, Wordle. I didn’t even know puzzles had editors! How cool is that?

According to the article, she was 56 when she was hired as Associate Puzzles Editor; it was her first full-time job working in puzzles after a lifetime as a crossword enthusiast, and about a decade as a serious puzzle constructor.

Bennett says that life has gotten better with each decade.

“Every decade, starting with 40, has been better than the previous decade for me. I’ve felt more agency with my life choices, more self-understanding, more self-awareness.” – Tracy Bennett

Her story is not all rainbows because six months after landing her dream job as the Wordle editor, her husband passed away.  As I get older, I realize that hardship comes for everyone at some point, and we all have something we must navigate.

I’m at the midpoint of the decade and hoping things start to hit an upswing.

We start by no longer choosing the short stick!!