There are still 2 more months for me to be 29. So this reflection on being is potentially premature. But there are only a couple more days left to be in 2023–and besides, I have a feeling that I’ll have something entirely new to say by February.

2023 eclipses 2020 as the year that required the most work. A different kind of work, anyhow–less scaffolding, and more plumbing. More electrical, more structural. The kinds of things that keep the house running now that it’s standing. And sometimes it was me being dragged along the sandpaper. Sometimes it was me that required rewiring. Months of being molded by force like I’ve been trapped between two rocks in a riverbed.

But that work is not of the busy variety and I knew that even while I was in it. It needed to happen. I needed to yell at the contractor, and lose faith between projects, and I needed to see the vision come together. I’m simply paying next year’s taxes up front, in cash.

I know that I’m working towards big things, good things, and–if I’m lucky–things that will last a lifetime under my careful craftsmanship. But even those things are not without work. Indeed, all I have built over the last 3 years are more rungs for my ladder. 

27 was about finding peace after the toil. 28 was about surrendering after a year of looking for peace in certainty. 29 was about intention after years spent readjusting and refocusing. 30 must be faith. Faith that as I climb higher things aren’t falling away below me. Faith that as I take my leaps, others are leaping with synchronicity. That should I slip on the way, I am being spotted. That space will be made for me to land gracefully. 

And I’ve talked enough about fools on here for it to be inferred that it’s good faith. 30 is good faith. I have spent the last half of my twenties untangling the things that trailed behind me in my chaos. Forming solid and compassionate connections. Showing up in my truest way. Dissolving all the grizzle around my open hands so that I can offer what was mine to give freely and with wild generosity to those I love. 

In these months and years of work, I have been pliant, empathetic, giving, tolerant, merciful, steady, and happy to be so. Have I not earned, in my 30th year, the safety of a soft landing? Have I not earned the ability to lean to relieve my feet? Do I not deserve to ask for small favors to ease my path from those I have spent years holding doors for? Of course I do. Hence, good faith.

But it’s much easier spelled out on a page I can close out of than lived everyday. Because at a certain point in our lives, we graduate from the well tread meadow of our youths into the particular bogs of our singular lives. Eventually the ground falls away to standing water, and the light is felled by the canopy. Suddenly, the certainty of our next step is not guaranteed. And we must be our own cartographers, our own soothsayers, our own forecasters–lest the ground swallow us whole. 

Here in my bog, no matter the light I summon or the soil samples I collect, the faith required for the next step is sorely won. No matter the credit in my ledger, the call for what I am afforded feels pricier than what I have in my pockets. Faith does not come naturally to me, a person who is intent on proving my value. Accruing is always safer than cashing in. But for what I have planned in 2024, for what I will need for all the years of my life, I cannot be a spendthrift.

So in 2024 I will not hoard my good graces, I am maxxing them out. I am finally, finally going to sit in the shade of the trees I planted.