Turning 40

I turned 40 today, and for the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a little about what this milestone means to me, trying to figure out exactly how I feel about it all. So I wanted to write down some of the loosely-connected thoughts and memories that have occurred to me over that time.

If you went back twenty years or so, and I asked people who knew me then to name my most distinctive qualities, “fear of strange food” would have ranked very highly. I was notorious for eating only the most whitebread (and mayo-saturated) items in the supermarket: Pringles, Lucky Charms, Coca-Cola. (Somehow despite this intake I was 6 ft. 1 and 130 pounds when I arrived at college.) “Foreign” foods with even the hint of spice were out of the question. In college I did finally get the inevitable taste for Indian and Chinese, though even then the joke was that, no matter what the cuisine, I would inevitably track down the dish that was closest to Steak-Ums and order that forever after. My diet was literally plain vanilla: For my first thirty years, I actually hated chocolate.

I bring all this up because the other day, I had what I believe was my first taste ever of pistachio ice cream. I had studiously avoided it all this time for one, entirely irrational, reason: its distinctive green color had suggested to me at some early age that it was “minty” in flavor, and thus not at all tolerable. I didn’t like sharp tingle of mint on my tongue, and much preferred smoother, nuttier flavors like butter pecan. And so I simply never tried it. Ever.

You know where this is going. It turns out that Pistachio has a lovely smooth, nutty flavor that lands squarely in my ice cream wheelhouse. (My wife delicately suggested that the fact that pistachios themselves are nuts might have been a clue.) And I spent that last four decades actively avoiding it for entirely imaginary reasons. What a waste! How many other equally ludicrous mistakes are out there? Can I spend the next forty years tracking them all down and unlearning them?

***

As some of you know, I’m in the middle of writing a new book. I’ll finish it sometime late this summer, and it will likely come out early next year. So that means I’ll have published six books before I turn 41. That sounds pretty great to me, though I confess it is only finally now catching up to the publishing schedule I imagined for myself when I was in high school. (I had a whole plan to publish my first book – likely a book of short stories or poetry – in my early twenties, but slacker that I was I didn’t get around to it until I was twenty-eight.) The stat that I’m actually most proud of is one that never occurred to me as a teenager: the total number of editions for all of the books, including the translations, which is now something like 50. Thinking about that number – and seeing all those spines up there on my shelf – never fails to make me happy.

I was thinking about all those books this week, but more than that I was thinking about the current state of the floor next to my writing desk. This is what it looks like today, a fair representation of the state it’s been in since I starting writing the new book earlier this year:

Despite what I’m about to write about this unruly pile, believe me when I say that I wish my office were tidier. The pile genuinely bums me out. Part of my growing up is an appreciation for the pleasure that tidiness affords you, the sense of everything being in the right place. But I’ve also learned that I can’t work without the pile; when you’re in the middle of a research-heavy book (like all the books I’ve written) you need to have a couple dozen books and essays sprawled out beside you as you write – it’s simply not efficient to reshelve them dutifully every night, given that the next morning you’ll likely be looking for the same page you were scanning the night before. So the pile persists.

For some reason, the other day I glanced down at the mess of books on the floor, and I got a sudden flash in my memory from 1985. I’m in my bedroom in suburban Washington and some friends are coming by to pick me to up go out to a movie, including a couple of girls that I’ve just met from one of the other – more intriguing, more artsy – high schools in D.C. When I hear the doorbell ring, I go on this mad rush, tossing all my legal pad drafts of poems and stories across the carpet, then adding all the impressive-sounding books I’ve been pseudo-reading of late. (“Qu’est-que-ce ca? Oh, that’s just Tropic Of Cancer by Henry Miller. Do you know it?”) It was pretty much all make believe, but I seem to recall that it worked whatever weird adolescent magic it was designed to do: I got the billing as the smart, eccentric writer guy (albeit the one with weird food issues.)

I flashed back to this whole episode – which I probably hadn’t thought about for at least a decade – and the first instinct was to chuckle: still a poseur after all these years. (No doubt if I was sixteen now I’d be posting pictures of the pile to my Facebook page to impress the girls -- which, for the record, is totally, totally different from posting those pictures to your blog.) But the second, and longer, thought was different, and more satisfying: if seventeen-year-old Steven could time-travel to his current workspace and see what it looked like, I think he’d probably be psyched. I think he’d take one look at my office, and say: “This turned out pretty much according to plan.”

And it’s true of much more than my office floor. I was always one of those kids who thought actively how cool it would be to have kids myself. (Part of the dream of being a writer was bound up in this fantasy of working from home, and being around my children all the time—which has more or less turned into reality.) In my late teenage and early college years, I had a slightly silly romanticized idea of a turbulent, writerly marriage, in part as a reaction to my parents’ stable, happy marriage, but I got over that soon enough, and realized that my parents were a great model for the kind of marriage I should have. And so when I look around, and think about the amazing family that has grown around me, and think back to that image of my future life that I had as a teenager, there’s a very satisfying feeling of continuity.

All this reminds me of great quote from the intro to Pynchon’s Slow Learner short story collection, a book which may well have been included in that 1985 pile on my floor, where forty-something Pynchon imagines going back to hang out with the twenty-something Pynchon, and asks something along the lines of “Would I even like that guy? Would I want to sit down and have a beer with him?” But sitting here at forty, for whatever reason, I’m imagining it the other way: would 1985 Steven have happily had a beer with the current model? I think he would, and that the pair of us would have hit it off. That’s one measure of success, right? Your continuity with your past selves; their willingness to let you buy them a beer. (And I say that with first-hand knowledge that 1985 Steven had a killer fake ID, so that’s not a factor.)

***

About a year and a half ago, my wife and I joined the Park Slope Food Co-Op, which for those of you who don’t know, means that once a month I spend three hours bagging dried fruit in the basement of a grocery store. There are a thousand things to be said about the Co-Op experience (and experiment) which for the most part I have enjoyed immensely, but thinking about turning forty reminded me of the striking initial impression I had after doing my first shift. As I packed up the last box, I had a strange, almost bodily, feeling that something was different, and it took me a while to realize what it was: it had been years, maybe decades, maybe all the way back to high school, since I had had such a strong impression of time moving so slowly. You’d bag up and price ten pounds of apricots and then turn and look at the clock and be absolutely amazed that only fifteen minutes had passed! Everything in my life was about accelerating time, the clock clicking too fast for you to keep up with it, but here in the basement of the Co-Op I’d stumbled across the land that time forgot.

One of the things that's always stuck with me from my Mind Wide Open research is that human beings vary predictably in their perception of time as they age. Time literally seems to go faster the older you get—not just in the span of decades, but also in the span of minutes. Put someone in a room without a clock or watch and ask them to guess when an hour has passed, and on average, the older person will perceive the hour zipping by faster than the younger person.

The older I get, the more I think that one of the keys to happiness—or at least one of the signs of happiness—is getting to some kind of place where time seems to be passing at the right speed. Maybe this is one of the weird hidden benefits of hitting the exact middle of your life expectancy, but I really do feel that sense of temporal balance right now: I don’t feel like the kids are growing up too fast or too slow; I love where they are in their development right now, but I can’t wait to see the next phases too. I love having almost ten years of married life behind me, but can’t wait for all the adventures we’re going to have in the next ten and beyond.

The only thing that seems a little accelerated, here at the turning point of forty, are the seasons. I wrote most of this on Shelter Island on a little 24-hour solo excursion to hang out by myself and play a little golf, and on the ferry over it was one of those brilliant early summer days, the first real beach day I’d experienced this year. Part of me thought “Ah, that first feeling of summer in the Northeast —I love that.” But then there was immediately this shadow thought, that if the actuarial calendar is right, I’m only going to experience that first-day-of-summer feeling forty more times. The number of summer days stretching ahead of me seems, for all practical purposes, infinite. But the number of seasons themselves seems unnervingly finite. In my mind, when I think of it that way, time does seem to speed up a little.

When I described this feeling to a friend once, he suggested moving to Brazil or Australia each winter, thereby immediately doubling the supply of first summer days left in my life. But maybe the more practical approach is just learning to savor it all, the way I was doing on the ferry out to Shelter, compensating for that finite number by making each turn of the seasons last longer. Either way, I’m aiming to make it last.

Comments

[Charlie]

Term of the day: "Ice cream wheelhouse"

[Keiron Nicholson]

What a lovely post. Happy birthday.

[burntsox]

Happy birthday! I was showing off twitter and blogs to a co-worker, and we were reminescing about turning 40 ourselves. P, the co-worker, commented that you are cute, which would make my birthday!

Many happy returns.

[John]

Great post, Happy Birthday. And welcome to the club (that's the 40 club - not Gardiners Bay CC :)

[Ehud]

Happy birthday. Me, I am still not 40, and I am still suspicious of green ice cream.

[Sean]

Happy 40th!!! I'm not suspicious of green ice cream but understandably i'm about the occurrence of green potato chips, you know something went wrong there!

On a sidenote, the second i saw that pic of the book pile i knew exactly the context (which i guess may be obvious to some), since that was exactly the state my books and papers were in when i was doing exam revision recently, except it was more a lava flow (writings in red pen certainly helped evoke that image) that encircled my chair - more prominently on the right side.

[Roy Christopher]

Good stuff, Steven. Happy born day.

[Ann Marie]

Thank you for a great read. Enjoy your birthday. It's nice to know that someone I admire also has "pile disorder."

[nickb]

Steven,
Congrats on turning 40 and doing it with such grace and perspective!

[Alex Drelles]

Happy Birthday! On NPR they sell a collection of drive way moments, where a story is so compelling you stay in your car until it's over, I think I just had a Blog moment. Your post was so refreshing and insightful I didn't want it to end. I can't wait for the next book, god speed in the next 40 years.

[Emmet]

I'm twenty-eight years old -- so about halfway between you and 1985 Steven -- and this post really resonated with me. Many happy returns.

[NewWestLiving]

Steven,

That's one hell of a mess you got there on the floor but good hell of a mess ;-)

Happy Birthday!

[fred wilson]

pistachio gelato is possibly my favorite food on planet earth. so now we have one food in common. the only thing i won't eat (and i do mean only thing) is white bread and mayo.

this was a fantastic post Steven. i wish i could write multiple thoughts at the same time the way you do.

and happy birthday too

Fred

[Roy Christopher]

Okay, I've been thinking about The Pile since I read this the other day. I found a solution, -- at least one that works for me:

A tea cart.

The one I've used in the past was metal and had three shelves. This allows one to stash articles, papers, books, etc. on the shelves and top, as well as still accommodating a laptop. The wheels and small size allow portability from one room to another and quick and easy stowing (in case of the sudden arrival of /artsy/ girls).

I used a 1958 tea cart while editing my master's thesis and two books (I had to let it go when I moved earlier this year, so I too am back to The Pile). Try it out.

[Tim King]

Happy B-day Steven. I've been away for a while and this was a nice post to come back to. Another flavor that hits the wheelhouse: Salt Carmel!

[Karen Elinich]

Thinking about the finite number of times left to feel that special "first feeling of Summer in the Northeast" sensation...

If you're anything like me (a Fellow Northeasterner), part of the joy of that sensation is that it actually comes four times per year. There's a comparable sensation on that first crisp Autumn day, even the first snowfall of Winter, and certainly the first day that Spring really truly arrives.

So, measure the remainder as 40 x 4 and, wow, 160 more wonderful, magnificent, sensational days await!

Happy Birthday!
A 41-year-old Fan

[Joe Harris]

Hi Steven.

Happy birthday.

Have you, perchance, ever read Paul Bowles "The Sheltering Sky"? Your line about "the... days stretching ahead of me seems... infinite" is eerily similar to a my absolute favourite line from the book.

If you haven't read it you must. It has certainly stuck with for the past 16 years.

Joe

[Steven Johnson]

hey Joe, that's so funny about Sheltering Sky -- was one of my top five books when I was seventeen, but haven't read it since. What's the line you like? I wonder if it stuck with me too and I was unconsciously plagiarizing!

[Jami]

I literally just finished The Ghost Map and was so impressed that I googled your name, found your site, read your eloquent musings on middle age and feel like I've found a voice for all the thoughts I don't have the ability to express myself. Your philosophies from science and technology to what it means to be human have touched a nerve with me. Thank you for existing and restoring my faith in intelligent humanity!
I'm about to go download Everything Bad to my Kindle and settle in for a good long read...

[Rick Diana]

Hi Steve,

Where you storing all this coooool data? Would you consider looking at Isilon Systems for your digitized content data storage needs?
www.isilon.com

Happy 4th of July and congratulations on turning 40---that's a great year and quite natural for you to be reflecting!

Rick Diana
908-967-0352

[Zeh]

Fantastic. Thanks for sharing.

[maks]

Time was moving at the right clip as I read that. Thanks.

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[John Crowley]

I just came across this blog from your Twitter message, and I enjoyed reading it. I'm turning 40 this summer, and you've helped remind me of some of the thoughts I had 25 years ago that I used to predict my life today. Thanks for those thoughts.

I look forward to your tweets.

[hairy cunt]

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and a half ago, my wife and I joined the Park Slope Food Co-Op, which for those of you who don’t know, means that once a month I spend three hours bagging dried fruit in the basement of a grocery store. There are a thousand things to be said about the Co-Op experience (and experiment) which for the most part I have enjoyed immensely, but thinking about turning forty reminded me of the striking initial impression I had after doing my first shift. As I packed up the last box, I had a strange, almost bodily, feeling that something was different, and it took me a while to realize what it was: it had been years, maybe
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