The math I didn’t want to do

I turned 40 recently, and I spent a chunk of the day doing math I didn’t want to do. The kind where you line up your age against the odds and the costs and the timelines and try to make it all come out okay. It doesn’t really come out okay on a calculator. That’s not how any of this works.

Eric eventually made me put the phone down, and we got takeout and watched something dumb. It helped more than the math did. I’m trying to remember that part, that some days the most useful thing is to stop counting for a while.