Having hit her fourth decade yesterday, our columnist is slightly philosophical and in the mood to share some personal lessons.

I AM 40 years (and a day) old today.

Why am I announcing this in a national daily? Perhaps seeing it in print might help this fact finally sink in.

It’s also a bit of a challenge with the passing of every calendar year to have your brain steadfastly remain in its heady 20s, while your body sends you stark reminders of your corporeal shelf life in the form of aches and creaks while running for the train. Or while pursuing anything strenuous for that matter.

Honestly, though, I’ve never quite bought into that mentality that one must behave “a certain way” when one has reached “a certain age”. If there’s anything my “uncertain” life has taught me, it’s that I should grab every proverbial bull by the horns and make a nice handbag – or two – of it.

Achieving this state of mind, however, has taken years of learning as well as unlearning. More so having grown up and lived in a society and during a generation in which “what people said – or rather gossiped” mattered more than “what made you content”.

Most of us are familiar with the conventional 3Rs that we are expected to have mastered by the time we leave school. In retrospect, I realise that I’ve added another four more Rs along the course of my personal growth: Rebel, Roam, Release and Revel.

With everything being so relative these days, a rebel to you may be someone who makes a sex tape and flaunts it, while to me it was doing something contrary to parental and communal expectations. For instance, forsaking a supposed high-flying career in law, for a “lowly paid” job like journalism.

How many of us have faced that limited quadruple choice of “doctor, lawyer, engineer or accountant” when we were at our career crossroads post-SPM? To this day, I do not regret my then-perceived “rebellious” streak to switch, despite having had to field questions and misgivings from “concerned parties” whose concern it simply wasn’t.

I decided that if I’m going to spend a significant portion of my life at work, then I should at least enjoy it. Sure there were the odd month ends where I survived on instant noodles, but the sheer adrenaline of writing, more than made up for this.

The B52’s once sang, “Roam if you want to, roam around the world.” These lyrics couldn’t be a more apt description of my lifestyle post-marriage. It certainly jolted me out of my comfort zone and opened my eyes to myriad options outside the perimeters of my private tempurung, for which I continue to be thankful. That is also why I’d encourage anyone to grab the opportunity whenever it presents itself to see and experience other lifestyles and cultures. You’ll either learn something new and useful, or appreciate what you already have.

Perhaps the biggest area of “unlearning” for me was to learn to let things go; release. In my case, a deepening sense of faith has helped tremendously. I was a firebrand in my younger days with a razor sharp tongue to boot. This doesn’t mean that I now have wings and a gleaming halo. However, I am learning to accept that sometimes it’s not worth getting your knickers in a knot over petty matters – and that forgiving quickly saves you stomach ulcers.

My husband’s late grandmother is the best example of revelling in life. She died two weeks shy of her 88th birthday a few years ago. She had single-handedly raised four children while her husband was away at war, and was forced to start from scratch after she fled with them over the border to West Germany. Yet her joie de vivre was contagious and she truly embodied the term, “age is but a number”.

Sometimes, though, I forget all this and wallow in self-pity and rant only to be silenced by timely reminders.

The most recent was a video of a Singaporean cosmetic surgeon, Dr Richard Teo, which has been making its rounds on Facebook. Teo, who had been diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer, had shared his life experiences with a batch of medical students and as I perused the transcript of his stirring speech, this resonated with me: “Don’t let society tell you how to live. Don’t let the media tell you what you’re supposed to do. Those things happened to me. And I led this life thinking that these are going to bring me happiness.”

Sadly, he passed away last month. He, too, was 40.

■ Brenda Benedict is a Malaysian living in Frankfurt. She and ABBA are the same age and ‘Dancing Queen’ remains one of her firm dance floor favourites.

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