I turned 40 today. Life begins at 40, right? Truth is, it doesn’t.

For most of us, turning 40 is like crossing that mid-point in a marathon and finding ourselves still at the tail-end of a sweating, panting mob. We know that even if we get a sudden rush of adrenaline and an inspiration to run faster, there’s no way we’ll end up at the top 100.

So, we just putter along, hoping to finish the race with a “respectable” time, maybe land in 101st place, consoling ourselves with the thought that it’s not about whether we win or not, but how we run the race.

And that’s the truth. When we reach 40, we gain enough sobriety to know that it’s no longer about winning. It’s about summoning those last, remaining ounces of desire left in us to push on and keep on living, even as our bodies begin to age and the life processes that animate our cells slowly decay.

Forty is when we start to just let life flow.

We think about those who had to drop out mid-way into the race: Friends, acquaintances – some we’d known for years, some we’d seen with only a passing glance, some who’d been a special part of our lives for one, brief moment, and some who don’t even know we exist – waylaid by cancer, stroke or an accident.

Sadly, there has already been a bountiful harvest this year.

Just weeks ago, an old acquaintance from my days as a student editor, Alecks Pabico, a journalist exceptional for his unwavering principles and self-deprecating wit, wrote 30.

At about that same time, a comrade, from way back when I was an imperialist-hating rabble rouser, lost an older brother, and just a month ago, someone I knew from my old college’s student council suffered a stroke after a pick-up basketball game.  Then there was Francis M, a gem of a performer and social activist, a fellow Bedista, the “master rapper” who left the building too early in his performance.

I have heard of at least four classmates from high school and college who have passed on over the years.

***

The reality is that at 40, invitations to birthday parties ebb, and a trip to a wake becomes less uncommon. Our countenance slowly becomes more rueful.

We start to worry more about our health and begin to regret those early years in our lives when we felt we were invincible, and we didn’t give a rat’s fuck what we put into our bodies. Time heals, but it also takes its toll. It takes its toll on our lungs, our heart, our knees, our eyes.

We take a long, hard look in the mirror, stare at that face with the smattering of white hair and receding hairline, those crow’s feet around the eyes, and the deep creases and lines forming all over our foreheads and cheeks, and we try to place exactly how far – or near – we’ve gone and who we have become.

We can’t help but come up with a very long list of things to regret. At 40, the process of gaining “character” begins.

Character, after all, is all about regret. It isn’t about doing something we’d regret. It is about knowing the things to regret, seeing the folly of something we’ve done and wishing we could do it all over, but knowing that we can’t because it’s too late. It’s about picking these things up and carrying them with us to remind us that life will go on, the world will spin without us, and that we really didn’t matter in the end.