Farewell, My Forties.

Thursday, 16th July, 5 AM. The only light in the house was the television. Singapore, the small hours, the far side of the world from the stadium, which is somehow always the nearer side of the heart. England were five minutes from a World Cup final, and somewhere in that cruel stretch of stoppage time, without ceremony, without candles, without so much as a glance at the clock, I turned fifty.

The two events are filed together now, and always will be. My fifth decade ended and my sixth began in the time it takes a lead to become a lament.

When the whistle went, I did not reach for the remote. Some defeats you switch off. This one I sat with, in the dark, on the first morning of my second half, because I recognised it. I had been living inside that scoreline for ten years.

The day that followed was gentler than the way it began: a day of candles and calls, of daughters counting my years with more glee than mercy, of reflecting on a letter I finally finished writing to my girls, and of one voice missing from the morning chorus for the first time in fifty years. Birthdays keep a ledger whether you ask them to or not. This one recorded both the fullest table I have ever sat at and the emptiest chair.

My thirties came easy, or at least they came the way form comes to a side playing at home: everything I struck seemed to swerve in. The forties defended deep. Every win in the decade was won twice, once in the world and once in my own head, and the referee stopped giving me the soft ones.

In the letter to my daughters, I gave each decade of my life a name, and every name ends the same way. The twenties were for striving. The thirties were for thriving. The forties, I finally admitted somewhere around the third serving of humble pie, were for surviving. There are more rungs on that ladder, and the letter climbs all of them, but those three tell you the shape of the story.

The decade saved its heaviest tackle for injury time. In its final months I lost my father: the first voice that ever sang me happy birthday, in a house where the monsoon kept its appointments more faithfully than fortune ever did. There is no tactical analysis for that. There is only the long walk back to the centre circle, and the decision to keep playing.

The thirties teach you the rules. The forties teach you the game.

So this birthday does not just get an essay. It gets a farewell, written at the border with my papers in my hand.

This weekend the final will be played without us, and I will watch it anyway, because that is what loving the game means: you show up for the football, not merely for the flag.

But here is the detail I have carried through the birthday week like a coin in my pocket. The side that ended our tournament was losing with five minutes on the clock. They did not manage the deficit; they attacked it. Every rational model said protect the point, preserve the pride, settle for penalties. Instead they committed players forward, and the game, being the game, rewarded the ones who wanted to win it more than they feared losing it.

That is the posture I am carrying across the border. Not the arithmetic of what my forties took, but the appetite of a team that trails late and still runs at the line. I arrive at fifty with more questions than I owned at twenty-five, about work, about worth, about what the second half is actually for, and for the first time in my life that feels like wealth rather than want. The answers were never the point. The asking is the season ticket.

Next month, on a slow brown river in Bangkok, sixteen rooms of friends will gather to sing the new decade in, and I intend to greet it the way the letter to my daughters promised: not surviving any longer, but arriving.

The whistle has gone on my forties. The scoreboard, if you insist on reading it, records a defeat. But the television is dark, the house is light, and the man who walked out of that stadium walked out in love with the game.

Aman Narain is the Founder and Principal of A2Z Advisors, a boutique fintech and digital advisory firm based in Singapore. Born in the UK, raised in India, educated in the US and France, he spent twenty-five years inside global banking and payments at Standard Chartered, HSBC, Schroders and Google Pay. He co-hosts the A2Z Fintech podcast with Zubin Vandrevala and writes A Man Who Blogs twice a week. He turned fifty this week, in the stoppage time of an England semi-final, has learned at last to love the game more than the scoreline, and is quietly pleased that he and his factor 50 are finally the same number.

📖 The letter behind the poem: my full letter to Nyla and Naina on turning fifty, including every rung of the decade ladder. [Letter to my daughters on AMWB]

📚 Victor Hugo, who put it best long before I borrowed it: “Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.”

🎙️ The A2Z Fintech Podcast, where the other half of my week lives.