Intro: 39 Things I've Never Done
Doing 39 new things before I turn 40.
Most crazy things I’ve been told about adulthood since I was a child are true. Olives taste good, sitting in a chair at the beach is more comfortable, and you really should have taken care of your teeth. At middle-age, there’s a new round of warnings — time will start moving quicker, you have to exercise for maintenance more than gains, and people will soon ignore all your opinions, even your entire existence in a way they haven’t since childhood. At this point, most of us are more likely to heed the warnings about old age having experienced the prophecies of the late 30s first hand. This is called wisdom and it makes it easier to project into the future about what the rest of your life will look like in a way you can’t as a kid.
At 39, when events and opportunities are ahead of me, I often do a pretty good job of forming the general shape of how they’ll unfold. That is one of the agonies of being alive, that so much that is wonderful and new becomes exhausting and rote. I was warned about this feeling, too, but I didn’t get it. Now I do. The more of life you experience, the more blanks get automatically filled in around new experiences before you have them. I can almost perfectly project how something will feel or affect me, the ways it will be rewarding or uncomfortable. It’s lucky to have gotten to live long enough to know all these things, but I am afraid that the more I assume I’ve done it all, the less likely it becomes that I’ll do anything.
To top it off, when unexpected things do happen, they tend to be terrible things, like a pandemic. Or someone dying too soon, or an accident that requires careful recovery. Disease, divorce, despair. Rarely, almost never, am I surprised by something great and I think it’s at least partly because of all the assumptions I’m making about what is possible. Those assumptions might be entirely correct. But why close off the little gaps of mystery where joy can get in?
I am trying to do 39 new things before my 40th birthday and write about them and share that writing. A cool thing I’ve realised starting this project is that I’ve actually done a lot of stuff. So, it’s been enlightening already. I hope some of the things I have done so far this year and leading up to my birthday in February are things I can recommend. I am also hoping that someone somewhere will maybe read some of these posts and think, “I should try something new,” and I hope it opens up a door for them to a part of their life they didn’t know existed yet, no matter what age they are.
Each post will be about a thing, big or small, that I hadn’t done and finally did. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments or drop me a line. If you’ve tried anything new lately, I’d love to hear about that, too. I will try to include with every post some other reading or info on the experience I’ve come across in case anyone wants to explore deeper.
As a final note, I want to say something about experiences in general. I try not to point at the culture and sadly shake my head, but here it is: In our culture, right now, the value of “experiences” is at an all-time high. Anything you can do that can be photographed in an exciting way is desirable. It’s very simple math and it works for both the algorithm and my lizard brain. I post selfies and I celebrate the accomplishments that are easily digestible on social media platforms with a pithy sentence or two. This isn’t necessarily anything to be ashamed of and it’s certainly the norm.
I still hope these “experiences” I’m creating for myself can be more than a check list. That’s why I’m choosing to write about them in the long form versus doing a TikTok series or Instagram posts. Because I hope that an experience can translate into nuance, a deeper understanding, and actually show me I can learn something about how I choose to interact with the world by interacting with it a helluva lot more than I have been.
Many of these new things I’m doing will not cross the threshold into profundity. Maybe none of them. But my efforts here include the hope for depth and transformation through action.
Okay, thanks for reading 39 Things I’ve Never Done!