I turn 40 today. Despite being labelled a baby by my 51 year old boss I feel very uncomfortable. I did a 48:13 10K on the thread mill this morning. That’s 4:49 per km or 7:43 per mile.  That’s a touch better than the 7:52 mile I did on Saturday last but that was an 8-mile run, not a 6.25 mile like the one this morning. Even so, that’s as good a run as I have had for a long while, and I have for the past few weeks, consistently did sub-8 minutes mile over a 6-8 mile run. At this rate I could seriously think of a 1:45 half-marathon and for someone who has just qualified for the veteran category that’s respectable, I should think. I was telling my wife on Sunday, that this is the first time in 8 years that I would miss the PJ Half. I should feel good physically but yet I am very uncomfortable at turning 40. I cannot put my finger on it. I have a new life here in Melbourne, away from many of the issues and factors in Malaysia which I didn’t like. My daughter is enjoying her school and has just enrolled in a respectable government secondary college for next year. My wife looks as beautiful as ever, is still loads of fun (except when she doses off in front of the tele) and I think our relationship is as good as ever, even better I think than when we first got married. As a family we are closer than ever. So my discomfort is not because of ill health and it’s not because of family or marital reasons. Maybe it’s my work. I am in a very good small suburban law firm. People here are very decent and hardworking, the sort James Herriot used to call salt of the earth type of people. Maybe it is the ongoing adjustments I am still going through. The adjustment from a city law firm doing corporate, banking and investment banking work to drawing up wills for moms and pops, drawing up loan agreements for ladies lending to their friends for their moms and pops shops, chasing debts for small traders and commercial people and issuing letters to local authorities over fencing and school enrolment matters. When your client is a listed major bank in the country you don’t write long explanatory letters to accompany your work. You attend senior management meetings to understand your client’s agenda and then brief your associates to draft the necessary deeds or agreements. You work through the drafts with these associates, send the stuff to the other side’s lawyer and plug away at the points and drafting. At certain junctures you do some research to establish a legal position. Then you stand your ground or reshape your draft accordingly. All this while your client is kept in the loop but does not participate in the rounds with the other side’s lawyers. The client becomes involved only when the issue has a commercial repercussion and you as lawyer make that call whether it does have such repercussion. Here clients are more involved, small moms and pops notwithstanding. They want to know, rightly of course because they are the ones feeding the meter, what all the to-ing and fro-ing is all about. So you take time to write lengthy letters to explain what is going on, at every turn. That is just one part of practice in my present context which I’m coming to terms with. Mind you these are not complex issues involving rights under a trust deed of a special purpose vehicle issuing asset backed securities against assignable streams of classified assets of commercial banks to be stripped and reissued to exempt investors to form part of their portfolio of qualifying investments for example. These are moms and pops who want to know if their mortgage is on fixed or variable rates or if son number 2 has a trust under their will. Yet the letters to be written have far more details, because these are folks who are literate and read and demand to understand everything they do. Not unfair but it does mean I have t make an almighty swivel to orientate my thinking and perception. Maybe this is what makes me uncomfortable – to be required to make such a manoeuvre at the ripe old age of 40. I should be courting company directors, sniffing for deals I can put my own money in, jousting and jostling for prominent catchment positions both in terms of money and position and worrying about which Ivy League institution my children would be enrolling in. Instead here I am living my life as a suburban lawyer (not yet qualified) and taking pride in my personal best for a 10k or 21k. Not better or worse, just different. Very different. I guess this is therefore less to do with the fact that I turn 40 today than I am now in Melbourne Australia living a life quite unlike the one I had been living for the preceding 15 years. Maybe this is my mid-life point.