For or Against: Turning 40 (Part 2)

Personal rules for stopping tears, staying put, and making eggs.

Hello! I’m still taking stock of life at 40, still coming up with personal rules and lessons learned, still eager to hear about yours!

Here’s part one, featuring rules 1-10.

11) Take a walk soon after waking up. Among the many benefits of having a dog is that I pretty much roll out of bed and go for a walk every morning, which always puts me in a better mood.

There are some scientific reasons for this — getting morning light helps you sleep better, exercising gives you more energy — but it’s also, for me, about the less measurable benefits of simply getting outside my apartment and seeing the rest of the world, which helps me get out of my own head.

Even when I start thinking about my own problems on the walks, I’m bound to get distracted: There’s the corner butcher arguing with a delivery man, both of them having a whole other type of day than the one I’m having. The new wine bar opening up on the corner has chosen a punny name, and I do not like it! Hey, is that Peter Dinklage? (It was! He was walking his dog, maybe with a quite similar observational monologue shaking him out of his morning melancholy, too.) 

12) If you feel tears coming on and you want them to stop, tell yourself, ‘Try to cry.’ This is advice an organizational psychologist gave me in an article I wrote years ago, and it really does work! Suppressing tears just makes them have a stronger hold on you, but actively commanding yourself to cry is tough for most people to follow through on — unless you’re a theater kid, I guess. One of my childhood best friends also told me that she tries clenching her butt muscles when she doesn’t want to cry, and I can attest that this seems to work, too.

13) When you travel, bring your own tea. Always nice to keep your tea options open.

14) If you want to wrap up a phone conversation, ask the other person what their plans are for the rest of the day. I like this tactic because it’s a way to turn the conversation toward the future, a future in which we will not be on the phone with one another anymore. My mom is now talking about the gardening she wants to get done before the rain comes. I’m talking about filing a story and buying groceries. From there, it’s only natural to hang up!

15) If you get nervous about public speaking, the easiest cure is to remember that it’s not about you. When I first started teaching as a graduate student, I would feel embarrassed every time I stood up in front of the class. I imagined all these college freshmen judging me on how I talked and how I looked and whether I was qualified to be teaching them about the enthymeme, a rhetorical tool that the University of Oregon composition program insisted upon instead of just sticking with a regular old thesis. 

But one day, a switch flipped: I remembered that the class wasn’t about me at all. It was about them, the students, learning new stuff and thinking new thoughts and — hopefully — making connections with each other. 

Once I changed my perspective, I didn’t get so nervous anymore. My focus wasn’t on me, even when I was the one doing the talking. Remembering this has helped me out in all kinds of situations since then, whether I’m leading a work meeting or giving a wedding speech. 

16) The secret to the perfect soft-boiled egg is to cook the egg in simmering water for exactly six minutes. You get a nicely cooked white with a slightly runny center that spills over your toast like a little egg sunrise. 

17) Stay. When I was in my 20s, I moved around a lot — college in SoCal, a couple years in Brooklyn, grad school in Oregon, a beautiful and lonely stint in the Berkshires. I was 30 when I moved back to New York again, with advice rattling around in my mind that I’d read in a book at some point, though I can’t remember now if it was from the poet Mark Strand or the chef Alice Waters or someone else with a California Zen sort of vibe. Whoever it was, the gist of the advice was: Find a place that’s good enough, and then just stay put. Build a community; don’t go searching for the perfect place that will bring you happiness, because it doesn’t exist.

I’ve definitely pondered moving in the 10 years since I moved back to Brooklyn. Perusing Zillow is a regular pastime of everyone shelling out half their monthly income for a mice-infested cupboard with no laundry, which is most New Yorkers. But I’m so grateful for the relationships here that have flourished precisely because of how much time they’ve had to take root. 

That’s not to say I’ll never move, or that people who decide to move in search of adventure or a cheaper cost of living or to be closer to family are in the wrong. Not at all! But I’m so glad I’ve had the chance to find out what happens when you stay. 

18) If you’re not getting a response to an important email, try changing the subject line. People get overwhelmed by endless email chains that are always popping off with the same old boldface subject line. It’s a reminder that the stressful thing in question is STILL not just over and done with already. So they (I) put off opening the latest email that will surely detail yet another twist in the ongoing drama of the stressful thing. 

But a new email subject line is like purple crocuses pushing up through the frost in March. It brings with it the promise of a fresh start, in which we can all be the calm, highly organized, emotionally stable professionals we dream of being. Click! 

19) Just because someone tells you something mean about yourself doesn’t make it true. This took me a really long time to accept! It was so easy to believe what other people said when I was younger and still figuring out my own identity and values. So when some guy I barely knew in my early 20s told me, for example, “It’s hard to picture you as a mom,” I spiraled, thinking he’d somehow seen deep into my soul and deemed me unworthy.

But other people don’t necessarily see you more clearly than you see yourself. They may be projecting or bringing their own biases to their assessments, or they may not know you that well, or they may be poor judges of character, or they may just be jerks. You don’t have to internalize what other people say — which doesn’t mean refusing all critical feedback, but which does mean learning to distinguish between the kinds of criticism meant to help you grow, and the kinds designed to make you feel, and stay, small. 

20) But if someone tells you something good about yourself, just assume it’s true! Enjoy the feeling! I have a habit of writing off compliments because I assume the other person is just trying to be nice. But recently I’ve been thinking: So what if they are? What’s the harm in believing them?