Nothing On The Calendar Today & Being 40

There was literally nothing.  Heather went to track, Jenna had a friend over and aside from a few dishes and dinner, I pretty much blogged and cleaned off a few office shelves.  It was a very relaxing day at home.

While browsing blogs tonight, I found something that was so perfectly put that I wanted to copy it hear for future reference.  A blogger friend, Jen, from Stray Junior Mint describes her feelings about turning 40.  I've been feeling so many of these things here in my mid-40's, and it is wonderful to have words to put with the feelings I've been discovering about this middle age.  Enjoy...

And so it is with getting older.  For years now and while I wasn’t looking, that narrow sky of my youth–blue and pretty as it was–has quietly spread into a vastness of purples and pinks and golds.  It has evolved from pretty to spectacular.  I am old enough to have experienced things and young enough to experience many more, and so satisfaction and anticipation greet me at this age, hand-in-hand.  I can feel my motivations shifting from what I can accomplish to what I can contribute, and I find myself worrying less about what others think and more about how others feel.  And despite what you’ve heard, I can say with authority that that delicious sense of possibility–remember it from your teens?–still exists in adulthood.  It just turns inside out.  I don’t wonder so much about what possibilities lay in wait for me; I wonder about what possibilities lie within me.  That mantra of the young adult–”What can I do?”–becomes, for a (real) adult, “What can I be?”  And I’m realizing–a little late, probably–that nobody, not a single person on the planet, is responsible for what I can become except me.  It’s comforting.  It’s terrifying.  It’s fascinating.  It’s forty.