40 by 2 is 20

A lot of my friends are suffering from an interesting psychological disorder, which I am sure that every individual has had to contend with at some instant or another in his life, but is himself convinced that he would never have had to encounter the same before that precise moment in his career. They are very suddenly feeling very old. Reason, they have all turned or will be turning very soon, the edge-of-the-knife age of twenty. We belong to the Chinese Year of the Dragon, which means that we have in us, the intrinsic fire of the dragon, the fire to win, succeed and all that dilly-dolly. The side-effects of being born in the year of 1988 are that in 2008, you become twenty.

The thought of not being a teenager anymore has hit my friends a lot more harder than the fact that the time has arrived for them to actually exercise their universal adult franchise. No more can they not help with the grocery shopping and get away only with the shopping and blame it on the internal mechanisms of the human body. I believe, there comes a time in one's life when you can no longer excuse yourself from doing something because of the inabilities of your best instrument. I guess that, subconsciously, everybody gives his body a certain amount of time to allow himself to get used to the beautiful instrument. And, I guess again, at the risk of erring, that this time frame for most is twenty years. At the end of these twenty years, you tell yourself, Goddammit, I have lived with this babe for twenty years and I better get used to it. (Maybe it is the same with marriage).

How else can you explain that when I wished a dear old friend of mine 'happy twentieth', she was reduced to a state of tears. Apparently, the ensuing mood of pathos lasted the entire day. Fortunately, I was far far away and the well-wishing had been done over an innocent sms which read 'happy twentieth' or something to that effect. Another one of my friends has her birthday in distant December. But she has already lit the lighthouse and warned all the ships of the impending disaster. She is freaked out by the fact that she is turning twenty. No, no what?

I agree whole-heartedly that turning twenty means that you have lived twenty of the better years of your life. But can honest retrospection and sheer fear at the particular moment turn back time? I guess not. I am no saint but I do infer some things. I believe in all honesty, that if you can live the next twenty years of your life the way you have lived the first twenty years, you become the happy person that you desire to be. Perhaps, then, even turning forty would not seem so daunting.

The thing is that my twentieth moment is yet to come and I have no idea how I will feel when it is finally upon me. I have a faint suspicion though, that I will feel exactly like I did on my first birthday, not having any clue as to what to do with the next day.