40? Forget it, Jake...

For the last 12 months me and my peer group/tiny circle of friends have been staring down the barrels of our 40th birthdays. One associate of mine actually said to me that, in his opinion, in this day and age, it’s really 50 that bears the gravity 40 only used to... We work longer, see, have our kids later, carry on carousing and playing with toys way past our teens and twenties, 40 just isn’t the staging post it used to be, three score years and ten is ancient history and all that…
Well, it’s a theory. But for each one of us the hour-glass is set up nonetheless, the sand doth run... I suggested to my friend, and he agreed, that the big birthdays are really an existential matter – one’s subjective inner sense of how far one has travelled to date, what one has achieved, what one feels oneself yet capable of – also, to some inevitable extent, certain significant other people’s estimations of the same, which may, frankly, determine how many more chances you get…
One inspiration for me is found late on in Roman Polanski’s memoir, where he describes his cautious, critical response to a script sent him in 1973 by Paramount’s Robert Evans, a script he liked but felt ‘simply couldn’t have been filmed as it stood.’ Polanski was sorry not to be more enthusiastic but his morale was low, after personal tragedy and a couple of pictures that hadn’t worked. Moreover, he writes, ‘I was also about to turn forty – a depressing moment in any man’s life.’ But he persevered with the script, took the meetings, resolved to do the movie. It was Chinatown, and it turned out, gosh, rather well. Indeed movies don’t come a great deal better. I guess the morals are, keep your nose to the grindstone, and don't be afeared to do something different.