This isn’t where I thought I would be. But then again my reluctance towards plans put me on no certain path. As a result, my life has resembled something of a Jackson Pollock painting with all its randomness, messiness and no sense of order or plan. It just happened that way. And if I were to try and trace one of the lines back to the beginning there would be no discernible path of how I got here.
Today is my 35th birthday, and I woke up wondering what it all means. I wondered what I had learned in 35 years and whether any of it mattered. By nature, I am sensitive and feel everything just a little more, so perhaps I should have expected that the arrival of another year would send me into a deep dive of introspection.
Thirty-five isn’t a milestone in the way that 16, 21, 30 or 50 are, but the distance from childhood feels pronounced and there is the knowledge that I will never be young again. But my mind still bends in ways that my body cannot, and on some days it can trick me into believing I am still just a kid.
It is always a little dangerous to look back too much or too fondly. I am not sure it is hindsight that we gain as much as a deluded sense that things were better ‘back then’. But what I know is that one of the privileges of youth is that we are more elastic and heal with greater ease in matters of the heart and body. As we get older, the battle scars of life tattoo themselves on us, and the bargains we make day-to-day can feel like an albatross that is hard to get out from under.
None of us knows whether life will be too short or too long, but it probably won’t be best measured by the number of years. When I reflect on the time gone by so far, all I have are the collections of the decisions I have made, and on the whole I think I have done okay. At times, I have probably given too much weight to my choices and treated them all as life sentences when the only truth is the impermanence of everything—happiness, sadness and life itself.
In my scattered existence I have come to believe that there is not a right or wrong way to life--there is only the way you choose. So, this isn’t where I thought I would be, but somehow I know it is where I am supposed to be.
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