I turned 43 this year. I also just had my fourth child — a boy named Cody. Two facts that arrived within months of each other, and together they've produced a very specific kind of attention.
The first three — Meghan, Claire, and Emily — came when I was in my thirties, when I still had the unexamined confidence of a body that just ran. You don't study the instrument when the instrument works. You think about other things: the next camera, the trip, the headphones, the next idea. Your body is infrastructure. You assume it holds.
Then you hit your forties. Nothing catastrophic happens. But things change — not all at once, not dramatically, but unmistakably. Recovery takes longer. Sleep becomes non-optional. A glass of wine that once dissolved quietly now sends a 2 AM invoice. Your body stops being background noise and starts being signal.
When you stop taking the instrument for granted, you start paying it the kind of attention you'd give anything you actually depend on. The interesting part: you always depended on it. You just forgot.
Having a newborn at 43 makes all of this precise. Cody is extraordinary the way newborns are extraordinary — genuinely miraculous, genuinely exhausting, completely clarifying. He wakes me at 3 AM and I am awake in a way that thirty-five-year-old me would not have recognized. I find myself thinking about VO2 max, about the arithmetic of compounding healthy decades. Not anxiously — with something closer to curiosity.
The full life
There's a particular texture to being at the center of a life this full. Thao managing the thousand invisible things I can't see — which is most of what makes the house actually work. Meghan becoming someone with fierce opinions and the willingness to defend them. Claire always with a book open somewhere, reading everything she can get to. Emily still at the age where the world is entirely magic and no one has told her otherwise. And Cody — new, dependent, remarkable, seven pounds of evidence that the future keeps arriving whether you're ready or not.
I'm at the midpoint of life if I'm lucky. Possibly past it, if I'm honest. What I know is that from here the view is different than it was from there. The cameras still matter. The ideas still matter. The music still matters. But underneath all of it, health has become the substrate — the condition that either makes everything else possible, or quietly removes it from the available list.
It turns out that's a useful thing to understand in your forties, while you can still do something about it.