At 50, I find myself in a gazing-up-at-trees phase. What does it all mean? It’s not completely clear – but it’s certainly bothering my kids
According to research undertaken by Stanford Medicine in 2024, adult human beings are subject to two “massive biomolecular shifts” – spikes in ageing, in other words – one at 44 and another at 60, confirming what most of us instinctively know to be true: that we get older in jagged bursts – not with gentle, steady progression. As the new year issues its annual invitation to stocktake, the thing I keep thinking is where we might place the equivalent emotional pivot points, those periods in which, after years of – God willing! – pottering along feeling roughly the same, suddenly, one day, there’s a change.
I bring this up because I seem to be in the middle of one, an inflection point that manifests in the number of times on the walk back from the school drop-off I stop to look at a bird in a tree, or a snail on a wall, or any number of other overwrought visual metaphors that allow me to feel momentarily like I’m inside a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hard to put one’s finger on what’s going on, but it has to do with the sense of an ending, which, if it’s sad at all, isn’t sad-sad; rather, it occupies that category of sadness I think of as the anticipation of future nostalgia.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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