This is 43.

One of the biggest ways I notice my age is how my body doesn’t recover how it used to. With sleep especially. My mind and body are not always in sync with recognizing this however.

You should listen to new music, and aggressively practice not making derogatory remarks about contemporary music being dumb. Because it’s not. You are if you complain about it as you get older.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that you have peers and former classmates who are starting to talk in terms of retirement. And you wonder how that’s possible, and wonder if in fact you should have gone to law school twenty years previous.

You feel like you should probably have more figured out than you do, so you can pass it down to the kids. And realise that no matter what age you are, you’re always figuring something out, and maybe it’s good to be transparent about it.

Sometimes your back really aches, or other parts really hurt, and you realize that your body doesn’t recover as rapidly as it used to. It feels less about not performing as well, though that’s provably true, and more about not recovering as well.

Forty-three year olds, no matter how grizzled or experienced or thick-skinned, can still get their feelings hurt. I have this on good authority.

Sometimes I am tired, and there is a different tired that comes from being up throughout the night helping kids than there is hiking up a steep mountain pass. With kids. The former drags along a weariness of spirit and soul, the latter lifts them up, even amidst physical exhaustion. (Dec 2019)

This may controversial. I don’t know. But here goes: as you get older, I am having to deal with hair in ways other than getting a (twice-a-year) cut or (once-a-month) shave. There is hair showing up in places I am not pleased about. For me personally, and perhaps this is vain or shallow - and we all have those in some form - I would like to fight this. I am not fighting aging, in the sense of being displeased about the age I’m at. But I would like to continue to practice grooming to keep my ears and nose a non-distracting presence when I’m conversing with someone, et cetera. And it is a conscious realization I am having to face: that I am going to need to use a $5 trimmer off Amazon to keep the hair where I’d like it, and not metastasizing to unwelcome locations. There. (May 2020)