According to research undertaken by Stanford Medicine in 2024, adult human beings are subject to two “massive biomolecular shifts” – spikes in ageing, in other words – one at 44 and another at 60, confirming what most of us instinctively know to be true: that we get older in jagged bursts – not with gentle, steady progression. As the new year issues its annual invitation to stocktake, the thing I keep thinking is where we might place the equivalent emotional pivot points, those periods in which, after years of – God willing! – pottering along feeling roughly the same, suddenly, one day, there’s a change.
I bring this up because I seem to be in the middle of one, an inflection point that manifests in the number of times on the walk back from the school drop-off I stop to look at a bird in a tree, or a snail on a wall, or any number of other overwrought visual metaphors that allow me to feel momentarily like I’m inside a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hard to put one’s finger on what’s going on, but it has to do with the sense of an ending, which, if it’s sad at all, isn’t sad-sad; rather, it occupies that category of sadness I think of as the anticipation of future nostalgia.
These feelings of transition are largely brought on by external factors – in my case, my kids’ last year of primary school – but are also, obviously, subject to cultural cues. I turned 50 at the end of November, which in any age prior to ours, would put me safely on the other side of a full-scale midlife crisis. But in an era in which 50-year-olds still dress precisely as they did 20 years ago – as if they’re about to commute to work via skateboard – everything has been pushed back by a decade. And so here I am, in what I have come to think of as my looking-at-trees phase, which last hit with this intensity in my early 30s and before that, adolescence.
That seems about right, doesn’t it? Three big pivot points in a life when one becomes, briefly but acutely, aware of time passing, and which in my experience, tends to hit during even-numbered years (for that reason, I’ve always preferred the lower pressure of odd-number ages). There’s that line from Don DeLillo’s Underworld in which he remarks of a couple working out on their running machines, “they were training to live forever” – and it’s the faltering of that delusion that ushers in these mind-blowing periods. In other words, I’m doing what everyone does as they age, which is to assume they are the first people in history to have experienced something people have been experiencing since the beginning of time – in this case: intimations of mortality. (See also: having a baby.)
By the way, children don’t like their parents entering this mode, partly because, at least in my case, it triggers observations like, “Weird to think one day our cats will be dead and we’ll be so sad”; and partly because it forces them to confront the horrifying possibility that their parents have interior lives as real and awkward as their own. That’s the other thing about these pivot points: their unavoidability. I’ve had occasional success when it comes to big, decisive life events of finding ways to cheat the impact by feeling the feelings ahead of time, at a lower temperature, and then sailing through the actual event relatively unscathed.
I managed to do this last year when I moved countries after 17 years and did most of my grieving in advance, bit by bit, so that I was blindsided only twice: once when walking away for the last time from the school my kids had been at since kindergarten – and feeling, to my utter amazement, almost panicked by the size of the grief. And the second time, spontaneously bursting into tears at the awfulness of saying the goodbyes I’d been so busy rationalising away – I’d forgotten to factor in what it would actually feel like.
By contrast, these more generalised periods of change don’t work like that, and it’s my assumption there’s no hack that gets us around them. Why would we want to, in any case? There’s that thing the director and actor Lena Dunham said, which is that, sometimes, it’s nice to do – or in this case – feel the thing you’re supposed to be feeling at the time you’re supposed to be feeling it. I feel that way now, as time concertinas. Looking ahead, what I wonder is how this period of my life will appear looking back, just as when I look back to last year, it appears in my memory as if through deep water. It seems like decades ago now.
