my undiscovered country

I'm 39.5 years old, staring down the barrel of my 40th birthday and making some decisions about how I want to be rounding that corner when it comes. Gravity has always been strong, and it pulls at me with the whisperings of this-is-as-good-as-it-gets and it's-all-downhill-from-here. They say deep calls to deep, and for me, it's the deep-dark spiral of human frailty calling out to the bone-deep fatigue that finds it origins in the broken butterfly at my throat. Give into the gravity. Go gracefully into the night. Succumb.

But I don't wanna.

And it's because I've begun to find my undiscovered country. I'm learning a new and unfamiliar language and unlearning some of the old words that no longer describe the terrain. After all these years, words like "slow" and "can't" and "stretched-out" are being supplanted by a new vocabulary--weird words like "glycogen" and "endurance" and "will". The landscape is beginning to shift and change in ways I never thought possible, and the view keeps getting more and more interesting and surprising to me. Kicking against the goads of gravity for the past several months has begun to shape my legs, and where there was once the pudginess of post-childbirth mid-life motherhood, I'm noticing sinew and muscle and a strength I've never before had. These legs have carried me now across a significant finish line, and they want to do it again. And again. They want to move faster and keep shaping and sculpting the new landscape of my middle age, until I pull across the finish line of my 39th year, an entirely new person in an entirely new world, breathing a new atmosphere where gravity is weaker than me.