Turning 40 is a traumatic experience for which our culture leaves us hopelessly underprepared. A steady diet of graduation speeches, Young Adult Fiction and anthemic pop songs encourage us to see the future as a field of open possibility, limited only by our imagination. Everything is potential, unrealized, open. And with our thirties being the new twenties, our culture gives us a generous 39 years to get our acts together. 39 years to live in a phase of promise, and not get too hung up on delivery.
And then there’s 40. Suddenly a world of possibilities becomes a limited set of concrete actualities. As a friend of mine recently put it, the only good things about turning 40 are 1) it’s better than not turning 40 and 2) you’ve well and truly avoided the risk of peaking too early.
I was born in 1975, which means you don’t need to be a maths wizard or a clinical psychologist to have a stab at what’s going on here. But in addition to cheap therapy, I also want to offer some thoughts on Michael Winterbottom’s 2010 film The Trip which is (among other things) a meditation on middle age and mortality.
The promotional material declaring The Trip to be a “totally hilarious road movie” and a “romp” hardly captures what is in reality very patiently told story of the travels, conversations and meals of two middle-aged men in the North of England.
The men in question are British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, who play versions of themselves. They drive. And eat. And do impressions of Michael Cain to each other in restaurants. And then they go home.
In the 2014 sequel, The Trip to Italy, the same basic premise is repeated (restaurants, reviews, Michael Cain impressions) but with a twist (Italy, not England). And then (spoiler alert) they go home.
(There is in fact a gentle but determined plot that rather beautifully finds its way to the surface the way Sydney’s ancient waterways find their way into the wet and weeping rocks around Circular Quay. But that’s for another time.)
Life after 40 is the recurring theme in both films.“Everything is exhausting past 40,” say Coogan in The Trip. On a failed attempt to flirt with a group of younger women in The Trip to Italy, Coogan mournfully reflects that, with aging, “they just look straight through you. Or look at you like a benevolent uncle.” In a cut-down to Brydon he says, “Anyone over 40 who amuses themselves by doing impressions needs to have a good hard look at themselves.”
Coogan regularly meditates on a career in which his enormous talent never quite delivered the stratospheric fame it seemed to promise—a theme grounded in the fact that the actual Steve Coogan’s enormous talent never quite delivered the stratospheric fame it promised. (I well remember discovering Coogan in the UK in the mid-1990s, and later reading an article in the Australian press announcing, “If you’ve never heard of Steve Coogan, you soon will.” In 2015, most in Australia still haven’t, and his original work outside of the UK has continued to attract a cult rather than popular audience).
Rob Brydon is far less haunted by the regrets of unrealized promise, largely because Rob Brydon’s career seems far less haunted by underealized promise. Whereas Coogan always seemed destined for Ricky Gervais-level popularity, Brydon has taken a talent for impersonation further than anyone might reasonably expect.
Every plot moves from possibility to necessity. As things begin, Odysseus might never make it home, Hamlet might not uncover the truth behind his father’s death and Luke Skywalker may well join the Dark Side and/or marry his sister. But in the end, Odysseus must return home, Hamlet uncovers the plot and Luke does the right thing, both with regards to Dark Side and in not marrying Leia. A host of possibilities become, in the end, a definite and limited set of necessities.
It is the same in a human life. In youth, our relationships, our careers and our achievements all lie open before us. But somewhere in our 40s, an open field of possibility is narrowed into a finite paddock of actuality. The list of things that might happen is overwhelmed by the growing list of things that will now never happen. I might have never married, or married Björk, or had daughters, or been a writer, or lived in New York. But I am married to Susan. I have all boys. I’m a pastor, and I live in Perth.
It is striking in our youth-obsessed and potential-obsessed age to note how much of scripture is given over to enabling us to cope with the givenness of life, to name and make peace with the finite set of possibilities each life offers, and to come to terms with our actual circumstances as creatures before God. The psalmist teaches us to “number our days,” (Psalm 90:12) Isaiah reminds us that “all flesh is grass and all its beauty is like the flower of the field/ the grass withers and the flower fades …” (Isaiah 42:6) and the apostle reminds the Corinthians that the situation in which we were called is a perfectly serviceable situation in which to live out our calling (1 Corinthians 7:17-24).
Our culture wants life to be experienced as endless potential, as limitless possibly. And often our language (but not our scriptures) reflect our culture in this way. Whether in the more gaudy form of “your best life now” promised through impossibly white teeth, or the more respectable form where the Christian life is endlessly pitched as “an exciting adventure.” (I remember giving a copy of Michael Horton’s Ordinary to a friend. She read the first chapter and came back in tears. “I was never given the impression the Christian life could be ordinary”, she said. “This feels like a different religion.”)
The Trip and The Trip to Italy offer a kind of cathartic experience by naming and confronting the way in which a human life plays itself out in all its surprising shortness. Catharsis is better than denial, but better still is to learn to entrust our lives in all their mysterious givenness into the hands of God, who plots our lives, and who envelops our stories into the great Story of his love in Christ.
