When you are 40, your teeth crack

Perhaps it's the human condition of self-centred awareness but you only really notice prams and babies for the first time after you get pregnant. You only get picky about hen and stag nights (and the costs associated) when you hit 30 and get invited to five weddings a year.  Then it's mortgages and schools and the first round of divorces. Ah the joys.

Every age comes as a surprise since, let's face it you've never been there before and there's no way you're going to listen to the old guys up ahead. You are never going to get stiff and sore and groan when you have to stand up. Not me.

Then you hit forty and it's almost a rite of passage to get a tooth abcess or have a tooth crack. It's all very surprising and comes around the same time as typeface inexplicably becomes legible only when held at arm's length.

On the plus side, if you are lucky, you may be at the top of your game and secure in a job. Then wham. You hit fifty and become a born-again teenager. 

Of course, maybe that's just me but like babies in prams, I am all of a sudden starkly aware of people around me making life choices; life changes;  and taking right angle turns on a path which had always before seemed straight. It feels slightly bonkers but also rather exhilarating.

So I'm walking away from a really rather wonderful job in a company to which, and from  colleagues to whom, I shall always be grateful. On the face of it, as a divorced woman with a mortgage, this doesn't look like my smartest move ever, but yet it FEELS right.

To keep on doing what you've always done doesn't leave room to grow. I confess I didn't have the slightest clue how typecast I had become in my marriage until I went on dates again with totally unsuitable people.  My favourite was with a wizened man who went on sex holidays in Vietnam. He and I shared a single, hilarious evening over Mojitos marvelling at how unfamiliar each other's life was.

You can't typically do that if you're married. And if I stay in the secure job which has been great for me for some 12 years, I simply don't have the time to pursue new adventures. So I'm off.

And I've been lucky enough to meet a lovely man who's taking me sailing.

Admittedly, "adventures" will almost certainly include not being able to blow money on things I don't really need. But nor will I spend 2 hours a day commuting 1,000 miles a month like Groundhog Day. I certainly no longer yearn to own more "stuff".

So I can only really speak for me but I'm aware I'm not a maverick or alone. There are lots of us out there fortunate to have health and the curiosity to say, "Life is short. Let's go and see what's out there."  

I feel incredibly lucky and alive. And just a little bit absolutely, gut-wrenchingly terrified. 

It's all good.