Impending Age

On Friday, I'll be twenty-eight years old and well on my way to completing my third decade of life. Those of you, my dear readers, who are my elders will undoubtedly mutter that I'm being overly dramatic about all of this. For all you youngin's out there, you can just roll your eyes and ignore this. Come to think of it, I don't know who I'm writing this for. Maybe it's me.

See, the first decade is the one I can hardly remember. Scattered memories of Australia, Fiji, Sweden, England, Holland, Norway, and even BrynJoe falling out of the top bunk in New Zealand when I was 3 are about all that really stand out. In short, whenever my family went away from Bethlehem. The normal days, the ones spent growing up on Montgomery Street, all seem to bleed together into a cheesy flashback montage of kickball games, climbing trees, riding bikes, and dutifully going to school. There were memorable events among those days as well: falling off my bike in first grade, my first piano lesson, summers at the lake, playgroup. I remember the Challenger explosion and the fall of the Berlin Wall as events that I was told at the time were very important, but I didn't really understand why. I remember wanting badly to stay home from school when I returned from the months in Sweden with an English accent firmly in place and had to deal with ignorant fourth graders.

The second decade was so short in retrospect. Mr. Zieger's class in middle school opened me up to the possibilities that my talents could afford me in the future. I learned to run. I found theatre. I had my first crush. I fell in love. I drove. I got into accidents. I got out of trouble. I got back in again. I learned to hide things from my parents (Buick. Bus channel. BPD.). Then somewhere near the tail end of my second decade, at a particularly low point, I had the wonderful realization that they're the smartest people I know.

In the third decade, I've earned two Bachelor's degrees and two Master's. I've had two long-term, serious girlfriends and a handful of relationships of varying length and seriousness. I've moved four times. I've lived with six different roommates and lived for two years on my own. I've continued adding countries to my list. I've saved money. I've lost money. I founded a Shakespearean troupe. I got paid to be an actor. I went on field research excursions. I edited a technical paper written by one of my idols. I discovered that I was born to be a teacher. I became a New Yorker.

It's something about the marking of another year's passing that gets me thinking about the twenty-eight years that I've been here. I look for the patterns -- look for the sense of it all. The truth is, there's no overarching pattern here. But I love my life right now. I'm living where I want to live and getting paid to do exactly what I want to do. I have made hundreds, if not thousands, of friends in my life and watched as some of them were left behind and some of them remained. The magic of the internet has brought some of the lost ones roaring back from the past, smashing the memories of my first two decades into my feel for the present. Somehow I always find myself surrounded by people I love and trust.

Last year, as the new year started and I found myself facing another birthday, I began to make plans and set goals. I have no intentions of doing that again. It's not that I lack ambition -- far from it. But I think this has been the year that I've learned to take life as it comes. I can't control what choices life will throw at me in this, my twenty-ninth year. I know that I have the ability to overcome obstacles without trying to choose which obstacles I will face. I have enough confidence in myself that I don't feel like I have to set in stone the challenges I will attempt this year.

So, at the risk of sounding Texan, I have only one thing to say to the potential struggles of the coming year: bring 'em on.