40 Years
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien
In just over a week, I will turn 40. It’s something that I have been thinking about a lot in the last few months. As I have mentioned before, I suffer from anxiety and this whole turning 40 business has been eating up a lot of my brain capacity.
You very well might be thinking that my anxiety over turning 40 is about getting old. That is an absolute false assumption. The idea that I am getting old is one that never really bothered me. When I was 22, my uncle said to me, “Don’t ever complain about getting old because there’s a lot of people dying to get there.” And it just sort of stuck with me. I guess it sort of flipped the script and made getting old sound like a privilege. Something to be sought after and I liked that.
Ever make a New Year’s resolution that you wholeheartedly intended on doing and you accidentally just kind of forget about it? Then in December you are suddenly reminded and realize that you’ve wasted eleven months and now feel like a big failure? Now pretend that you’ve been doing that for a year that has lasted 480 months and you’ll begin to understand how I have been feeling about turning 40.
Like most kids, when I was about to graduate high school I was told that I would need to choose what my career would be for the rest of my working life. And like most kids, I was completely unqualified to make that decision. In my case, by the time I graduated college, I was 100% certain that I didn’t want to go into the career that I had just spent the last four years learning about. In case you are interested, it was film and broadcasting.
After graduating college and working for my uncle for a summer, I took a job at a temp agency and was placed in job at a mortgage company. That job turned into a successful career of two decades where I learned countless skills and gained priceless experience. One lesson I learned early on was that I didn’t like the industry and really didn’t want to work in that field, and yet, it took me almost two decades to extricate myself from it.
Why—would—I—do—that?
Several reasons to be honest. The biggest reason by far was that I didn’t know what I actually wanted to do with my working life. And that fact has been causing me to have so much anxiety over turning 40. I look at the trajectory that my career is now on and for the first time that I can remember, I am happy with it’s direction.
Now that I have found my real calling, I have started putting a lot of “should haves” on my shoulders. I should have figured out my passion earlier in life. I should have worked harder to escape an industry that was a bad fit. I could have been so much more productive in the things I love but now I have to work twice as hard and play catch up because I was dawdling for 40 years.
As you can see, it turns into a lot of negative self talk, which is never productive and not at all healthy. Then I recalled a simple story from the book of Exodus in the old testament of the Bible. When the Israelite people escape the Pharaoh, they spend 40 years wandering in the desert before coming to the promised land. And guess what? It’s because they couldn’t decide what they wanted to do. They took forever to accept what their true calling was and kept avoiding it. Hey, that reminds me of someone I know! I have come to like the idea that maybe, just maybe, I have been wandering in the desert for 40 years while trying to figure out what I should do with my work life.
The quote that started this article comes from the book, The Fellowship of the Ring. A book where, a group of heroes goes on a journey that is supposed to be straightforward and instead turns into a multi-book epic quest where huge sacrifices must be made before the heroes can win the day.
It’s also worth noting that when the Israelite people finally got to the promised land, they still had to fight hard to get rid of the bad guys who were living there. Also, at the end of the Lord of the Rings saga, the heroes have to use all the experience they have gained on their journey to have a final fight with the villains to reclaim their home.
Maybe you find yourself in a similar place having just finally made it to your destination after wandering in the desert. Or maybe you are still wandering. Either way, it’s worth understanding that it’s all part of the journey and you will indeed get to where you want to be, even if you aren’t quite sure where that is.
If you need help figuring out that destination, shoot me an email at jason@yourturncoach.com and let’s see if I can help you out.
-Jason