Pushing 40 is better than pushing up daisies

I'm 39.  There, I said it out loud.  I sat in the holding room of the Manila airport waiting for the flight back home.  I don't know why I was thinking of my age.  I remember looking at 30 something year old women as a teenager and dreading the day I was that old.  I wanted to be worldly and witty, like the cast of thirtysomething, but only at the age of 18.   Now I am that old and I look around and realize I will one day be middle aged.  I looked around for some 40something year old women and wondered if I'd look like that one day, then wondered what that was. They looked happy.  They looked ... like they had seen too many things. 
I've never been afraid of getting older before.  I don't think I'm afraid now, not so much the physical part of aging anyway.  I listened to their conversations.  They were more substantial than mine; less about dreams and plans, more about family and life already lived.  Am I being overly dramatic? Will I stop talking about my dreams one day?  I can feel my heart pounding.  I don't want to settle, to sit around and talk about what I did and what I could have done; what went well and what I wished I could have avoided, no. 
Maybe I'm feeling this way because I have time sitting in my room healing, not being busy, not occupied enough to forget there are things I don't want to think about.  Like wasting time.  Like wasting life. A friend says it might be a sign that I need to slow down and look at things a little longer. The OCD part of me wants to start a bucket list, but the flesh and blood Boni part of me thinks that's really truly overly dramatic.  Still, I can't help but think of the things I want to do still.  There are big things like I want to write a children's book.  There are semi-big dreams like traveling to Greece.  Then there are the dreams you can't control like I want to see my children grow up to be kind and successful men and women.  I want to always wake up in the morning excited to go work.  I want to feel loved and give love each day that I have breathe in me.
I don't want to think of the nevers, who wants to dwell on the unpleasant?  A friend says it's our experiences who make us who we are.  I'll be whoever it is I was who endured whatever it was that came my way... no matter what.  Perhaps that's what both frightens and fascinates me.