Forty Years In The Rearview
I turned forty years old on August 29. I don’t usually care about birthdays. To be honest I usually dread them for whatever reason. This birthday felt like a milestone. It brought with it all sorts of existential thoughts about crossing the bridge of youth into the second half of adulthood. Forty seems symbolic because my mind still thinks I’m in my twenties, but my knees and graying hair remind me that those days are long gone. To my friends a few summers ahead of me in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, they see my bellyaching as amusing, I’m sure. “You have tons of life ahead of you” they’ll say. God willing, I hope they’re right. Middle-aged was just never a title I thought I’d carry. I just assumed a sniper or a viper would have gotten me by now, but here I am.
It's hard not to look back over the last forty years with both pride and sorrow at the same time. I’m proud of the things I’ve gone through, and of the things I’ve accomplished. Equally, I mourn the friends and family members lost along the way, the missed opportunities, the dreams I’ve yet to see made real. This is life. It can’t be lived looking in the rearview, you’ve got to own it and move forward. Mistakes and triumphs alike both define the man I have become. Carl Jung says “life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.” I’m going to start looking at aging this way. It was all research to get me where I am, data points along the way. Perhaps I should stop looking at turning forty as the beginning of the end, and more as a new beginning. It’s the culmination of years of extensive research.
I don’t really think I’m afraid to die. The cliché is that I’m just afraid I haven’t truly lived. I try to remedy that by seeking things that give me life and perhaps even legacy, like writing and visiting nature with my camera to document the journey for posterity. Some of the mourning I feel is that it’s no longer as easy as it once was to get out and climb mountains and chase wildlife like I did in my twenties, but I ain’t dead yet! The logistics of finding the time to do the things I love seems too complex some days. All of my friends now have kids and I don’t have any children, which leaves me the odd man out and usually adventuring alone.
“life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.” Carl Jung
I think crossing this age threshold symbolizes, in many ways, that I need to come to terms with the fact I’ll likely never be a father. I guess I’ll settle for eccentric uncle. I think I’m more well suited for the latter anyway. It’s time to suck it up, stop making excuses, and just do the damn thing, whatever that thing is. I have next to nothing tethering me from chasing dreams and passions for the foreseeable future. I have the privilege of reinvention and persistence many of my peers may not, simply because my life is unmoored by responsibilities many people my age have. I’ll look at it this way from now own. It is a gift to still be able to chase whatever dreams I still have.
The full weight of time lived has begun to press down on me and it makes me realize how fleeting life on this tiny planet is. I don’t want to take it for granted anymore. Forty years went by in a blur, in the blink of an eye. I saw computers go from a novelty in my elementary school library, really only useful for playing Oregon Trail, to a behemoth that houses all the information of the Earth. Computing devices went from filling whole rooms, to fitting in our pockets. I saw the death of print media with newspapers and magazines going from our primary daily news source, to archaic industries that couldn’t keep up with the times. Now we get our news from dancing teenagers on TikTok and Instagram set to the beat of “progress.”
I used to scoff at weirdos who got Netflix DVDs in the mail, thinking, who would pay for this? Why don’t they just go to Blockbuster? Now Blockbuster and DVDs are relics of the past, and Netflix rules our evenings. People used to read books, believe me, they did. Now, people can’t be bothered to spend more than thirty seconds of their attention on a short blurb on social media, much less an article and God forbid a book. Speaking of social media, this is a relatively new phenomenon too. We used to spend time in person and call people on the phone, now we text and facetime and spend many hours both physically alone and connected to the entire world. The times, they are a changin.’
For over half of my life, our country has been engaged in wars; especially if you count the smaller skirmishes outside of the Global War on Terror like Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Panama, Grenada, Desert Storm, Desert Shield, and likely others I’ve forgotten. I went from playing Rambo in the woods with my siblings, to later going to war with my brother. Six of my forty years I wore a uniform. Only a little more than two of those six years were spent in uniform away from home in either training or armed conflict. I spent a number of years yelling in hardcore bands about the government and the environment. I wrote eloquent lyrics and then growled them at half-time to breakdowns, providing the soundtrack as people beat each other up in the mosh pit. What a time to be alive.
It took me almost ten years to get a college degree. I dropped out four times before finally getting a Bachelor of Arts. I wanted to study frogs, but realized after dropping pre-calculous trigonometry no less than four times that maybe math wasn’t for me. Don’t get me started on chemistry. I started off college very ambitious and double majored in history and environmental biology. I quickly decided to just focus on biology, then added film and poetry classes to my already heavy workload. I got to work in a research lab studying bats for a few semesters. I dropped out at the end of my third year of college to go to Iraq. That free college I signed up for was no longer free. After finishing one semester directly after coming home from war, I decided to drop out again because my life was falling apart. I went back two years later in the summer and I felt more out of place than ever. I dropped out again because I felt the nudge from God to try something different. I enrolled in a small Bible College and changed majors to Practical Ministry with a focus on Youth Ministry. Graduated top of my class two years later with a wife, a new mission, and student debt.
I spent the first few years of my marriage doing a traveling road show communicating the Gospel while using animals, mostly reptiles and amphibians; combining my two degree paths and writing my own story. I was a snake handling preacher, er, not that kind. It was a hard sell to say the least and we hemorrhaged money during that idealistic venture to save the world. I wrote and self-published three children’s books and one Christian devotional book combining scripture and nature during that time. I produced a DVD series hosting an animal show, got calls from TV producers wanting to offer me shows on cable networks. Signed multiple contracts for production deals, got pitched all over town to all the major players. Animal Planet wanted me to be the next “turtle man,” according to one pitch, I opted to maintain my integrity and decline. That dude wasn’t anything I wanted to emulate. One pitch wanted me to host a show on faith similar to Anthony Bourdain, one pitch wanted me to showcase wildlife research on military bases, along with myriad other pitches that fell short. All those emails and calls got me was an ego boost and then the soul crushing crash each time they declined. None of that stuff ever amounted to anything.
A few years later, I got a small grant and put out a short documentary on my service in Iraq. It included interviews with the guys I served with ten years after we got home juxtaposed with footage I shot while deployed. This was equally as rewarding as it was heartbreaking. We had to wrestle with feelings we’d buried, all in real time on camera. The documentary was used in some NC schools and that felt good. We had a documentary premiere at a museum, people clapped, my old commander spoke, it felt awesome to see something I made get a positive response in person.
During this time, I took a temporary job with the Federal Government working for the Department of Veterans Affairs that later turned into a permanent job. I was at least providing a decent income for once. I went viral briefly on TikTok for a frog video, got more production calls from network people, restoked my ego, then more letdowns when the calls stopped. I decided to focus more on photography and found that was more rewarding than dancing like a circus monkey in front of a camera for likes. I learned that I could do just as much for conservation with photos and a good caption than making documentary style videos no one watched. I came to terms with letting the video dream die, at least for now, and doubled down on my writing, since it’d always been my first love anyway.
“it’s not about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward.” Rocky Balboa
I can’t say I’ve been overly successful in any venture, but I’ve tried a whole heck of a lot of things and have stories to tell. In the end, maybe that’s all that matters. You’re not going to find too many people more well-rounded than I am, at least that’s what I tell myself while complaining about failures past. To quote the theologian, Rocky Balboa, “it’s not about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward.” Maybe that’s what it boils down to. Forty years and I’ve never stopped trying. I keep getting hit, but I don’t quit. I keep moving forward, and that’s something to be proud of. I’m too stubborn to give up, and one day it will all make sense.
Perhaps it won’t make sense, but by then I’ll be too old to care and I’ll probably have had new revelations by then. It’s just good to remember where you’ve been and what you’ve done sometimes, even if it didn’t “work out” how you thought it should. Living by comparison is crippling, so I’ve got to stop doing that. This is my journey, there’s never been a straight path anywhere, but by God I’m going somewhere at least. All the ups and downs have been building blocks to get me where I’m at and hopefully to where I’m eventually going to end up. Here’s to forty more years of figuring it out one step at a time, making my own path, and always finding a backdoor way to get there. Better late than never.
Fantastic essay, man!! That 4th paragraph reeled me in!