Turning 28

At the age of 28 my father was raising two kids, the writer Maria Popova was composing her “Figuring”, and the student Oliver Sacks had yet to revolutionize medicine and hundreds of thousands of lives. For many others past and present it’s an age never reached, a milestone perched in the imagination but the distance left untraversed.

Our earlier, more predictable years – school, rules, and authority figures trying to ruin our fun – provide only a small fraction of what the future will be like. Given this, it’s hard to imagine that there’s anything worth looking forward to when you yourself become “one of them”, the grown-ups. But the past ten years have taught me there is.

You can travel alone. You can learn how to rollerblade, slackline, and play the guitar in the midst of a pandemic. You can explore and question consciousness and its contents, sometimes with the help of a capped friend.

You can make friends online and go ice skating in Boston. You can watch sunsets on the rooftop of mountains bathing in alpenglow over blueberry pie. You can fall in and out of love – with music, with books, with ideas, with strangers – over and over again, at all scales of experience.

You can quit. You can grow. You can die and be born again in the minds of others. You can start a venture, fail, and still succeed because you tried it and you gave it your all the way you once gave everything your all as a child with no eye toward consequence and opinion. It didn’t matter as long as you were doing it all out of joy and love.

At times I still feel like the 16 year old striving to become a competitive League of Legends player, the lost boy of 24 searching for himself on a trek across Spain, the shy kid of 21 tasting freedom for the first time on a meditation cushion. These younger versions of me are deeply engraved like faded tattoos, and my body is fully covered. Yet skin is dynamic and being is a process, not a final rest stop we arrive at once a certain age is reached. There is always room for more, even in the simplest of lives.

I have some sense of direction now. I’m loved, in love, and have always been loved. I’m smart enough to stay dumb and dumb enough to keep chasing out of curiosity, love, and beauty. I’m committed to things bigger than myself, and my life feels simultaneously whole and full of potential.

It’s scary sometimes, this constant change. It involves openness, letting go, and letting in, always acts of vulnerability. But worse to me is the still image of stagnation, the unformed person who believes his life had peaked in college, the couples who lose their individuality and have nothing left to learn from and give to each other, a society with divides that nail you to the cross of their narrow narrative while they themselves are divided. Worse to me are lives without life, eyes that don’t see, bodies unembodied, hearts that don’t feel.

We have two kinds of birthdays: the one when we’re born, and the one when we’re born again.