Aging and Change

I just turned 29 on Jan­u­ary 17th and I’ve been pon­der­ing aging. It’s become our com­m­mon under­stand­ing that aging is a painfully slow, yet even more painfully fast, process of grow­ing old and rick­ety, senile and for­get­ful. We spend our lives long­ing in vain for the pre­vi­ous year, the pre­vi­ous decade, or the pre­vi­ous life stage. At the one-quarter life mark we switch from look­ing for­ward to look­ing back, never spend­ing a day look­ing here at the now. Each year just as we begin to adjust to our new age, to wear it and per­haps own it, the loom­ing annual “cel­e­bra­tion” strikes, again putting our per­sonal aware­ness out of kilter.

I’ve spent a life strug­gling with whether to accept the things I see around me that just don’t sit right. Rush hour baf­fles me, that we all live trapped in the same sched­ule so much so that we clog the arter­ies of our com­mu­ni­ties twice a day– not to men­tion we get pissed off in the process. This same lens has led me to rebel against age.

The Dec­la­ra­tion

I have made a deci­sion. I will not limp out of my 20s and into my 30s with a wim­per and a pout, I will not let my 29th year be a year of slouch­ing my shoul­ders and mourn­ing the goals not achieved and the tasks not accom­plished, and I will not live a life that uses pre­cious time long­ing for the things past that I failed to appre­ci­ate only to not appre­ci­ate the things present until they have become the newest things past.

I will live a life anx­ious for today peer­ing to what could be tomor­row, I will live a life that eeks out every drop of every age I have the oppor­tu­nity to expe­ri­ence so that when it comes time to turn the page I have no more use for the pre­vi­ous num­ber, and I will live a life built on what I have or what I could have, not on what I don’t have or what I did have. It all starts today. Project 29: the twenty ninth year project

The Project

I want to take the time to be pur­pose­ful in mov­ing for­ward and to reflect on what my move­ment means. This isn’t a project about being dis­ap­pointed where life is at the final turn of the 20-somethings. This isn’t about squeez­ing in all of my per­sonal expec­ta­tions or goals before it’s too late. This def­i­nitely isn’t about mourn­ing the end of a sig­nif­i­cant decade in the tale of one’s life. This is a project about tran­si­tion, inten­tion, and hope. It’s a project to use a time when we tra­di­tion­ally mourn time past to flip the script and make it a cat­a­lyst toward dreams future. Let’s do this thing.

In the com­ing days I will lay out what I’ve got in mind so far for the adven­ture that is Year #29.