31 Aug 2026
This month, Ruth Newman thinks about first times, last times, and why the years in between have a habit of speeding up.
A few weeks ago, at the grand age of 39, I had a first day at work.
I was nervous, which was expected, but what surprised me was how vivid the day felt. I remember the train, the weather, the exact point at which I realised I had forgotten the name of the person who had just introduced herself. I remember looking around the office with the slightly over-alert expression of someone trying to appear relaxed while privately collecting clues.
Most Tuesdays do not leave this kind of evidence. They happen, certainly. They contain work and conversations and whatever dinner happens to be easiest. Then they disappear into the general archive. I could probably tell you what I did last Tuesday if I checked my calendar, but I could not tell you what the day felt like.
A first day is different. It has edges.
Turning 40 is now close enough to have become mildly intrusive. Birthdays with a zero in them encourage a peculiar amount of accounting. Time becomes less like weather and more like money.
I had assumed the year before 40 would make me think about achievement. Instead, I have become interested in why some years feel enormous when you are living them and others seem to vanish almost as soon as they have happened.
Children do not seem to have this problem. Recently, I was chatting with friends I have known forever. Their children are becoming teenagers now and listening to my friends talk was like overhearing dispatches from a country I used to live in.
Everything mattered. A small social development could occupy an entire afternoon. I realised that their lives are currently full of landmarks. Mine, by comparison, is extremely well organised.
This is one of adulthood’s great achievements and, perhaps, one of its less advertised drawbacks.
We spend years becoming competent at our own lives. We arrange things so they suit us and get very good at predicting our own reactions. Self-knowledge is supposed to be one of the rewards of getting older and I suppose mostly it is. There is genuine pleasure in no longer requiring extensive research into whether you are someone who enjoys hiking. You have data now. You don’t.
But knowing yourself can become strangely restrictive. “I’m not really a person who does that” sounds like self-awareness, but it can also be a beautifully efficient way of making sure nothing unexpected happens.
The older I get, the more I wonder whether this is part of the reason time seems to speed up.
Novelty leaves a mark. Repetition does not. Last month I spoke about editing. Memory, I suspect, is a particularly ruthless editor. It keeps the scenes where something shifts and compresses the rest into montage.
Childhood feels impossibly long in memory because so much of it is being encountered without precedent. Adulthood is often expertly frictionless.
We refine our routines until Tuesday resembles Wednesday, one month runs into the next, and then somebody says “Can you believe it’s nearly Christmas?” as though Christmas has personally committed some kind of fraud.
Maybe that was the real purpose of my 40-before-40 list: to interrupt the blur, to give this year a shape I might actually remember. To stop it becoming a year that slipped away unnoticed.
The most interesting experiences on my list so far have not necessarily been the grandest ones.
What matters is the slight destabilisation. Doing something unfamiliar interrupts the seamlessness. Being a beginner is particularly good at this.
Adulthood rewards expertise so heavily that incompetence starts to feel faintly indecent.
There are fewer opportunities to be openly bad at something without immediately deciding it is “not for you.”
Then you walk into a new office and discover that, despite years of professional experience, you still need somebody to explain the coffee machine. There is something very reassuring about this. For a few hours, your identity becomes less settled. The version of yourself you already understand has to make room for new information.
That is what first times offer, I think. Not simply excitement. Evidence that the story has not finished explaining you to yourself.
The strange counterpart to this is the last time.
This summer I left a job where I had worked for 10 years. I had expected leaving to make me think about the future. Instead, I became unusually conscious of the present. Ordinary things became closing scenes. A meeting I might once have found tedious became the final version of that meeting I would ever attend. A familiar journey stopped being routine because the number of times I would make it again was suddenly finite.
Endings create edges too.
The uncomfortable thing is that most of them do not give us advance notice. In the history of every life there are final occasions we failed to recognise. A relationship changes shape. A place that once belonged to everyday life becomes somewhere we no longer go. Nothing announces itself. This should probably send me towards some inspirational conclusion about appreciating every moment.
Unfortunately, I find “cherish every moment” to be an appalling amount of pressure. Some moments are not worth cherishing. Some are admin.
Trying to observe your life too intensely creates its own problem. You end up standing outside the experience, narrating it to yourself while it is still happening. There is a distinctly modern anxiety in trying to make everything memorable.
I do not want every day to be significant.
I like repetition. I like knowing where I am going. Constant novelty would be exhausting and possibly expensive. But I am beginning to understand that there is a difference between having a life that feels settled and having one that has become so familiar it stops registering.
That is the tension I am interested in as 40 approaches.
I do not need reinvention. The culture surrounding milestone birthdays can make a perfectly functional person feel as though she ought to emerge from the year with a new career, a new haircut and a suspicious enthusiasm for cold-water swimming.
I am much more interested in remaining interruptible. I want life to retain the ability to surprise me, including with information about myself.
Not every year needs to be a blockbuster. But I’d like, one day, to look back and think: that was a good one. I’d watch it again.
