Today is the last day of my thirties. And I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. The last decade of my life has been quantitatively and qualitatively the best of my life, and yet, I’ve spent more than half my 30s with a fascist dictator dismantling my country piece by piece, and the last five years as a virtual hermit due to Covid and the world’s (but especially my country’s) decision to ignore it and pretend like it isn’t an issue.
Despite those things, my 30s have been very kind to me. I started my career in technical writing at the outset of my 30s. I’ve made some of the best friends of my life in my 30s. I’m more financially secure now than I have ever been, and boy do I know how lucky I am, because it very easily could have been way worse.
I’m a guy who likes to look at patterns and see formations and constellations in the noise and chaos of random events. If I had to sum up each of the last decades of my life, it would look something like this:
- First Decade: I was a child once. I know it seems strange, but it’s true. Not much to report about this decade, other than it happened.
- Second Decade: Transitioning from child to adult. Learning and unlearning and relearning so many different things and trying to mold the half-cured material that I was becoming while I was becoming it.
- Third Decade: This was the decade of breaking and reforging the values and tenets that I hold most cherished to this day. Unlearning a history of fear and dogma and embracing a future of progress and hope. Also I got married to my best friend, I left home, and I moved away from my home state. So, lots of upheaval and change.
- Fourth Decade: These last ten years have been all about growth and becoming established. Setting down roots, building upon the foundation of what came before and raising up structures. This has been simultaneously both the most and least liberated time of my life. The most because I have had the greatest amount of free time and resources in my adult life, and the least because of the aforementioned Covid pandemic.
So what will my fifth decade have in store for me? If I had to wager a guess, I would hope that these next ten years (and I will be hopeful that there will be ten years) will give me opportunities to leverage the stability and establishment of the last decade to push myself more, to experiment, to be more fearless and less worried about failure.
Time is finite, at least for us, and I think I’m ready to spend it a lot more thoughtfully and wisely.
