1

I’m still in my 40s today, and as I move from the decade some friends tell me was the best decade of their lives to the one other friends tell me is the best of theirs, I’m trying to come to terms with my utterly irrational hatred of the number 5.

I don’t want to turn living through ten consecutive 5-something birthdays – including a horrific double-five – into the worst decade of my life… because I don’t like the number 5.

Wait, it’s even more irrational than you think.

I know nothing about numerology or kabbalistic magic – which always sounds like cannibalistic magic, don’t you think. I just don’t like the number 5. It’s icky.

I should like it. It’s a cute number. It’s a prime number and a Fibonacci number. I love 3 and 7. I embrace 4 and 8. I’m neutral about 0, 1 and 2. I’m cool about 9. I’ve got reservations about 6 and I hate 5.

Flora: And we’re still debating about where I got my pattern things from?

Jane: Me. I know it’s me. Sorry, child.

I google the meaning of 5 and hey, if I believed in numerology, all would be hunky dory. The number five is amazing. It symbolizes curiosity, freedom and change. New beginnings and opportunities, high energy, excitement.

The Wikipedia definition resonates with me more:

5 (five) is a number, numeral and digit. It is the natural number, and the cardinal number, following 4 and preceding 6, and is a prime number.

It’s just a number.

Get over it, you freak.

2

My dislike of 5 is not new – I did not like being 5, 15 or 25 (I don’t remember 35 or 45; life was intense). But I concede that some angst about turning 50 is mixed into it. I’ve not been relishing the approach of this round birthday. I barely noticed 30 or 40 – it was another birthday, another year. The 50 seems – very round.

And significantly closer to death than 40.

It’s presenting me with dual angst: First, a sense that there’s not that much time left. Less than 30 years (I plan to be dead at 78 – but that’s another story), and the last decade passed in a blink. The clock is ticking. And second, perversely – 28 years left, an entire lifetime. What am I going to do with them, how am I going to make sure I don’t piss them away?

3

I’m reading The Marginalian and Maria Popova’s insightful (but long-winded; I love her, but the woman needs a ruthless editor) summary of Marion Milner’s a Life of Own’s Own:

Here then was a deadlock. I wanted to get the most out of life, but the more I tried to graps, the more I felt that I was ever outside, missing things.

…I could not understand at all that my real purpose might be to learn to have no purpose.

…

I want to feel myself part of things, of the great drift and swirl: not cut off, missing things, like being sent to bed early as a child, the blinds being drawn while the sun and cheerful voices came through the chink from the garden.

…

I want… the patterns and colourings on the vase on my table … I want to be so harmonious in myself that I can think of others…

…

…why was I always striving to have things or to get things done? Certainly I had never suspected that the key to my private reality might lie in so apparently simple a skill as the ability to let the senses roam unfettered by purposes.

…

It struck me as odd that it had taken me so long to reach a feeling of sureness that there was something in me that would get on with the job of living without my continual tampering.

I suppose I did not really reach it until I had discovered how to sink down beneath the level of chattering thoughts and simply feel what it meant to be alive.

It resonates.

4

Five is just a number.

Fifty is also just a number. It’s also half a century. Definitely the latter half of mid-life. Maybe the beginning of the last quarter.

I don’t mind aging, getting older. It’s better than the alternative.

I just thought I’d be somewhat more with it by 50.

Instead, I feel, in so many ways, like I am back at “start” again.

Except with baggage.

Scratch that. 

With experience. Right?

5

Five is a very cute number.

It combines lines and curves. It’s in the middle, and I like to be in the middle. The middle is cozy, fun.

My decade of fives will be fine. Fiery. Formidable. Freaky, even.

(Menopausal bloggers have ruined fabulous and fantastic as adjectives that can modify 50.)

(Omg, I’m about to become a menopausal blogger, fuck me now, how did that happen?)

Five.

Just a number.

A cute number.

Curvey and strokey, bold and soft. 

A perfectly good candidate for a favourite number.

My favourite number.

So cute.

Ha.

I’ll totally come to believe it. By tomorrow.

See the power of story?

xoxo

“Jane”