I met with an old colleague for an hour run on Saturday. I missed him and told him that our conversations in the office kept me working in the corporate world far longer than I intended to. I don’t miss the work, but I do miss some of the people.

The run started at a Grant's Trail entrance and looped around a half-mile hilly gravel path that we circled about ten times.

We both turned 40 this year and enjoy the endurance stuff in our spare time (although I am going shorter in distance these days). He told me that he went fishing with his son about a week ago and watched him reel in his first catch.

“That is a cool thing,” I said, “to experience all those first moments again you might’ve forgotten about, through someone else’s lens.” And suddenly, listening to that story, memories of my own childhood flooded my mind, of being at a pond in the dense Carolina woods with my brothers and casting our own fishing poles into the water.

We found ourselves talking about aging and how little sleep we needed as kids. I used to often stay up all night watching TV and playing Nintendo, even on weekdays. In high school I would stay up for Jay Leno’s Tonight Show or some hyperviolent anime, or just whatever was playing on SyFy channel. Sleep be damned. If I was a slave to the system during the day hours, the night was my time.

I couldn’t imagine myself doing that now. I’m the worst version of myself if I sleep for less than seven hours and as the Hulk would say, “You won’t like me when I’m angry.”

I bring that up because we noted that 40 feels the same as 30, but if one looks backward carefully enough, the signs of change become more apparent. One doesn’t often notice the first stages of a cavity.

Then I think that yeah, I guess I don’t recover like I used to.

We were the last generation to grow up without phones, to require imagination for preventing boredom, and to lack social media. It’s easy to connect with someone over that experience.

What a great generation to grow up in. I believe that makes us lucky as hell.