Right now, I’m about six months short of my 40th birthday – the official shift into middle age.  Though, at this point, I can hardly believe I’m that old.  And I’m not alone; I’ve only recently aged into feeling happy about it, but I’ve long been told I look younger than I am.  In fact, I shaved off my beard completely this past weekend, to start the new year fresh, and have since been getting heckled by friends and colleagues about steering clear of vans with tinted windows and strangers bearing candy.  Still, whether I look the part or not, the big four-oh is nearly upon me.  And, actually, I feel pretty good about that, and about generally hitting a sort of midway point in life.

Looking back at my first 40 years, I’ve done a ton of stuff that I feel proud of, and I’ve done a bunch that I screwed up pretty spectacularly.  Such is life.  Or, such was life 1.0.  These days, I’m trying to think about this birthday as an upgrade to life 2.0, and therefore a fresh start on the second half.  Sort of a do-over, but new and improved, with all the wisdom gleaned the hard way in the prior four decades.

I’ve been thinking a bunch of late about specific lessons, and about what I’m hoping to do differently – better! – in the next chunk.  And while I’m sure I’ll be blogging a ton about that in the months to come, at the moment, there’s one improvement that’s particularly on my mind: this next half, I’m going to make sure I take my time.  Because, looking back, I see I spent so much of my first 40 years racing forward, trying to make everything happen RIGHT NOW.  But, it turns out, there’s way less hurry than I thought.  And, further, I can see that most of my mistakes in life came from trying to get there the fastest way rather than the most strategic one, or from trying to make things happen more quickly than the world seemed to want to unfold on its own.  Conversely, when I look back at the things I feel most proud of, almost all of them were the proverbial ten years to “overnight success.”   Which is to say, sometimes what looks like the slow route actually turns out to be the fast one, paradoxically enough.

At the moment, for example, my wrist is in a splint.  It’s fractured, though only minorly so – a hairline at the end of my right radius bone.  And, in my youth, I might have just tried to power through.  But, now, I’m at least slightly wiser.  I haven’t given up on working out altogether, but I have adjusted to do everything with only my other good hand for the next six to eight weeks.  And though, after making a huge amount of fitness progress over the past year or two, I’m sad for the backslide that will doubtless cause, in the scheme of things, two months is nothing.  I can make back the progress lost a few more months down the road.  And, in the meanwhile, bones heal at the speed they heal.  Bad things happen if you try to push life faster than it will organically go.

Thus, these days, I’m thinking a lot about the classic joke: an old bull and a young bull, standing on top of a hill, looking down into a valley of cows.  The young bull says, “I’m going to run down the hill, and I’m going to fuck one of those cows.”  The old bull replies, “I’m going to walk down the hill, and then I’m going to fuck them all.”

And though I’m happily taken (I was going to say I’m a one-cow bull, but suspect Jess might object to that characterization), I increasingly relate to the joke nonetheless.  Whether it’s something as small as rehabbing a broken wrist, or as big as figuring out the details of Composite and the next decade of my career, I’m taking my time.  I’m thinking like the old bull.  And, going forward, I’ll be strolling down each and every hill.