Yesterday was my birthday, and I had a conversation with a friend about how much more uncertain we feel now, in our forties, than we felt in our thirties. Or maybe uncertain is the wrong word—another option might be over-awed.

By which I mean: I know what I’m doing in a lot of areas of my life, and I’m happy. I feel lucky, and the devastating way that history is unfolding around me highlights how lucky I’ve been. But the sense of clear trajectory I felt in my life up to this point is absent; it’s a little like graduating from high school or college, stepping off that treadmill of expectations, and thinking, Now what?

And it’s not fear exactly that makes me ask that question: it’s the dizzying sense that more is possible than I thought, both good and bad. Hence the awe. The universe is less mechanical than I believed, more wild. It does not go ever upwards, but around and around in every direction. Possibility diminishing, returning, ever-feathering. That sounds really conceptual but what I mean is, you work towards a goal and maybe you get it, but there’s no end point where the end should be. Maybe you don’t get it, but there’s no end there either.

On a personal scale, and on a monumental, social, political one, things are out of our control—even we ourselves are. And that’s scary, but also interesting. After all, life didn’t end after college, even when the old set of rules went away. I guess this is why people have mid-life crises. It’s why everyone went nuts after reading All Fours last year.

Anyway, in my personal universe some things are afloat and some things are pinned down. The baby is good: I hope that everyone is, in their life, looked at with as much adoration as he looked at the cake on my plate last night. And I hope that they sleep better than he slept after eating fistful upon fistful of cake.

It’s spring, and the past couple of weeks haven’t been too hot yet. The palo verdes are midway through their bloom around town, so that some are still lit up like candles and others have frayed and retreated into a meditative green. The pollen remains a hammer to the head. The rain never seems to fall. Javelinas are still trolling the neighborhood looking to cause trouble, and since I still have two pumpkins left from Halloween, I’m considering leaving them out for those hooligans, because who doesn’t need a cool treat.

God knows I’m just going to buy new pumpkins in October, because at least a few things are predictable.