We as a species have decided that time means something. That no one in their twenties is responsible enough to plan for the future and no one in their thirties is lively enough to stay out past 10. Forty is when you stop caring what people think and sixty is when you’ve paid enough dues to be released from the indenture of society. And because we’ve been endowed with a heretofore unseen hair of foolishness, we assign our own personal time especial meaning. 

It’s Thursday and in 3 days, I will turn 30. It hit me in a parking lot last Sunday, the day before I started a new job. I had one week left to be everything that everyone expected me to be until they expected me to be something else. And because my life is governed by a compass that points due inward, I knew in that parking lot that the next week needed to be intentional. I needed to spend everyday honoring my twenties by doing all the things I wasn’t supposed to be doing in my thirties. And instead, I spent the week in Zoom meetings and orientation sessions and dinners in strip malls. And I drove into the same parking lot today, with 4 of my good weekdays burned and realized I would fail to meet my own arbitrary expectations. 

There’s a strangely punishing sort of yearning that comes from letting yourself down in such a way. I can’t reclaim the time, and so the countdown becomes more urgent. These 3 days need to mean more than they were ever supposed to. But there is no consequence for defaulting on a borrowed ideal. I will still turn 30 and my life will still be what it was anyway. And really, I never gave it a fighting chance. I didn’t make a list of long-since unrealized dreams, I didn’t set goals, I had nothing in mind.

That’s when I wondered if it might have been a fruitless little dream all the while; There is nothing that I need to do especially, urgently, differently in this last week of my twenties, because I did it all.

I became a published author 3 times over. I wrote one more novel and one more collection of poetry. I grew immensely, terraformed my life into something peaceful. I pruned some relationships and I watered some too. I live in a beautiful house over a crescent moon shaped slice of lake. I am a professional that would have intimidated me at 21. I have traveled to many countries. I’ve jumped into the pacific ocean with wild whale sharks and snorkeled the second largest great barrier reef twice. I saw the great blue hole and Mayan ruins and cleansed myself in a cenote. I tossed and turned through the midnight sun and was chased by dogs in a little Italian car in the Tuscan countryside. I drank Champagne in Champagne and ran through fields of rapeseed in the Cotswolds. I burned on a hill overlooking Bar Harbor. I sailed over the coastline of Manuel Antonio. I’ve done things I’ve already forgotten.

I also was not always my favorite person in my twenties. I settled for things that dimmed my life and daydreamed about solutions that were always in reach. I spent the early part around people who caged my potential and stroked my bad habits. The opportunity to flower was always made possible by putrid fertilizer. And I can honor that more by moving forward than staying rooted in it for another 3 days.

And here’s the other thing, here’s the really good thing–everything I never did in my twenties is not lost, it is something I still get to look forward to. I get the privilege to have all these wonderful things still before me. And who can argue with that? More life? So many of my favorite memories haven’t even happened yet. That’s not missing out, to me. 

I said it at 28, and I’ll say it again–I am going to live like there is a tomorrow and that I care about it. I am not going to rush through the good moments of my life. I will let the intentions of everything I want to do steep until the brew is rich. Everything, all of us, will happen when we’re good and ready. 

I stand here right on the precipice of being everything I already was and everything I still get to be, in one calm moment between thoughts, and I can see clearly that there is nothing yet I have to do. Everything before me will unfold as the gravity of the thing intends. All that is expected of me now is to stand in this one brief moment, this cliffside of the year, and be.