The strangest thing about turning fifty-five is that it doesn’t feel any different from turning forty-five, or even thirty-five. I suppose thirty-five was different because I was pregnant with my daughter, but I don’t remember feeling any particular age. And I don’t feel any particular age now. Twenty-five was different because I was working as a lawyer and trying not to be completely miserable in the world of corporate law. It was actually more different than fifteen, when I was still in high school and still myself, more or less. Still the self I am now, rather than trying to be someone else. I was writing poetry and reading literature, which is more or less what I’m doing now.

It feels as though the years between fifteen and fifty-five have been a return to who I am — a long, hard road that has taken me back to myself.

I mean to write this post last year, around my birthday, but I was in Budapest and so busy that there was no time. I suppose this post is really about time, about what a strange thing it is. I didn’t think much about time until I became a lawyer. Of course as I was growing up, there was time to wake up, time to get to school, the schedule of the school day signaled by a bell I hated the way a cat might hate the bell around its neck. In the regional dialect I grew up with, in Virginia, it could be “high time” for something, meaning it should happen now, and maybe should have happened some time ago. In college there were syllabi telling me when to turn in assignments, when exams where scheduled. There was a rhythm to the semester. The first time I remember really being conscious of the passage of time was in my early twenties, when it became “high time” for the girls I graduated with to get married. I remember feeling as though, if I was not married in my early twenties, I would have somehow missed a crucial step in the dance my girlfriends and I we were all dancing — as though life were one of those balls in a Jane Austen novel.

Later, I realized this was once again regional. The female law school students I met in Massachusetts were definitely not getting married in their early twenties — there was a ten-year difference between what was considered normal in Virginia and normal in Massachusetts. Instead, they were thinking about how long it would take to make partner in their law firms, and planning their lives around that particular track. In the law firm, I had my first experience of time and mortality. All of my work had to be accounted for in fifteen-minute increments so the law firm could bill by the hour. We lived under the tyranny of the billable hour, just as I had once lived under the tyranny of the school bell. One day, I remember trying to calculate how many billable hours there would be until I died. That was the beginning of the end of my legal career.

The next time I remember feeling the pressure of time was in my early thirties, when I thought, if I don’t have a child now, I may not be able to. I was in graduate school, my then-husband was in graduate school, and it was not an easy time to have a child, but then everyone said there was no easy time, really. And I was thrilled when my daughter was born. That was the beginning of a different relationship with time, because when you have a child, you live with a small being whom you fervently hope will outlive you, will have a long and happy life after you are gone. You are presented every day with the fact that life is a cycle, and you are part of that cycle. You live with physical evidence of your own mortality. Of course, most of the time you’re too tired to actually think about this, but it’s there, like existentialism for John Paul Sartre.

And what is time now? My daughter will be turning twenty this year and as she had gotten older, I’ve lost that sense of time as so physical, so urgent. I feel, once again, somewhat immortal. I have to remind myself that my time on this earth is limited, and that I have things to do. Sometimes I wonder how much time I have left. But it’s more as motivation than existential crisis, because the other thing I’ve learned over the years is that there are two kinds of time. The first is the time of the bell and the billable hour, which passes and passes and passes, inexorably. But at the same time, there is yes, another kind of time — the time of subjective experience, in which a moment can last forever or a day can pass all too quickly. We can lose time, as when we scroll on our phones and realize, hours later, that time has passed and we have barely experienced the world. And we can have moments of exquisite being when we are fully alive, and it seems as though the experience will never end, that it’s etched in eternity. I have so many of those potential moments left that I’m pretty sure I’m going to live forever. More practically, my grandmother died at ninety-six, and all the women in my family live a long time. So there is that.

Mostly what happens as you get older, I think, is that you return to the essential self you had when you were young. Somehow society covers it up, like layers of varnish on an old painting, and then time cleans it again until you are back to the original layer, like a Vermeer after a museum restoration. At least, that’s my theory today, and it could be wrong, or only apply to me. But I feel closer to my fifteen-year-old self than my twenty-five-year-old or thirty-five-year-old selves. And when I think about all the things I still want to do in my life, I think, there’s plenty of time — but I’d better get started.

(A photo I took of myself on my birthday, already thinking I would write this post. No makeup, no filters, but excellent lighting by the city of Budapest.)