Turning Forty

What other people think

It's still hard walking into a room and not caring what other people think. Now I have a real distance between my last drinking episode and have been working hard on my personal development, I sometimes get these moments where I see who I am and where I am headed.  At times it can be completely terrifying and humbling, - at other times I feel I am slowly turning around like a big oil tanker in the harbour.

Now and then we all recall little snippets other people have said to us years ago and it has been a real fault of mine to nurture a throw away line into a mantra and let it define who I am .  Like the girl who said when I was in my late teens "Stop apologising all the time"  and I took to to heart - or the guy at college who said "you're always seeking approval" - that was a real strike deep into my being, or my father saying "But you've got something about you that people just don't like"  or my mother "All parents like one or another of their children a little more than others"

it's a sombre moment bringing down the elephant in the room

He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time – it might have been five seconds, I dare say – he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time...
George Orwell Shooting an Elephant.

It is part of my sobriety and personal development to process this historic and  out of date information and set it aside so I can move forward.  But in saying that, it still hurts and taking the heat out of ancient pain is where I find myself right now.

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I'm turning forty in less than a week.  It's funny how as a young boy you set these milestones around random ages or dates and there is simply no escaping the authority that four zero has.  Like all ages that end in zero, 40 is a defining age, a time that has in-built social triggers and a whole expectation built around it.  In a google search for turning forty there is plenty about personal development and taking stoick and assessing where your life is headed.

What if I told you I don't have a regular job?  What if I explained I'm still sort of chasing butterflies for my next business venture and I spend my days tapping away at a keyboard looking out my front window?  What if I told you I've stopped drinking six months back?  What if I told you I'm doing 6am Yoga three mornings a week?  What if I told you I'm feeling content and grateful and in the right place right now?

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My plans for the future are exciting and leave me breathless with anticipation whenever I share them with someone else.  The next decade shapes as my time to flesh out who I want to be and add the detail and colour of all my frustrated dreams and wasted opportunities of my twenties and thirties.  It's like I know who I am and what I want, and I am definitely pointing in the right direction.  Being sober is a given - if I drink I die.

It's taken me all my life to get to this point where I can know the difference between confidence and arrogance - between me and my ego - and know that what I need from life is not necessarily what other think I need.  Or that I should be running some disconnected race that isn't who I am for some silly status or to jump through some ridiculous hoop.  It is amazing to disconnect who I am from where I live, or what I do, or my wife or my children or my family.  Seeing me as a gentle, flawed human who is not always striving to be something is key.

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I'm not a big one for parties or having people around looking at me - what other people think is something I cannot control or even really want to consider.  So there is not going to be a party or a gathering - it is just plain awkward to have a non-drinking party and I don't think it will serve any purpose other than highlight what I am not instead of what I am.  Anyway, the last two fortieth parties I went along to had a sombre underlying feeling of getting old and just drinking for drinking's sake.  For sure turning 40 is a time for reflection and new growth, but waking up with a hangover and slobbering drunken nonsense is not who I am anymore.

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I can look out my backyard and see my tree ferns I planted and fed and watered now tall, out of reach and casting dark fairy shadows on the ground.  I can see my daughters talking and walking and writing and surging through their childhood.  I can feel my body getting limber and loose and releasing the tension and angst from years of neglect.  It's not that bad at all - I'm not mourning the loss of anything - but seeing me as a sum total of all my decisions and choices and not putting a label on myself or who I am.  I am forty, and I'm alive and sober and in the best shape ever to go forward with humility and gratefulness to whatever comes my way.

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There's something about Yoga that re-wires my brain - facing face first into the mat, breathing and opening my body at the same time as consciously not thinking - of just breathing and going with the flow.  It is a great lesson in non-resistance - in acceptance and self love and not striving and just doing the postures without putting a story to it or having to be anything.  My yogi called it comeing home to the mat - the incredible simplicity of bending forward with your hands out in front and bent at the hips - downward dog - it is grounding and humbling and exactly what I need to step away from my mind chatter and just release.

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My drinking was always about resisting, I used to see it as a badge of honour to have a disrespect for authority - to resist sometimes just for the sake of feeling the current push against me.  As though I was fighting upstream, when I all need do is tumble along with the current and let it take me wherever it leads.

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What other people think is what other people think.  Simple.  Not what I think.

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