Coming Around

“If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?”

I’ve been getting that question a lot lately. I guess people can smell 30 on me, though I like to think they recognize the movements of someone who has accepted and embraced the start of a new decade, the stage when the world starts to feel new again.

At this moment, I am at the furthest point from my childhood, but that period of my life has never felt so close. It feels like 30 is the year when my adult and child selves will live as next door neighbors.

Life so easily excites me nowadays. I love any opportunity to learn something new that makes my palms sweat. The thought of embarrassing myself by doing something out of character does not lease much space in my mind. The Lego aisle is where I come alive; striking up conversations with kind strangers in the grocery store is becoming a favored past time of mine.

A cool breeze makes me so effortlessly happy.

It seems so apt that my age ends in zero, a distant circle coming around, returning to its point of origin. Start, middle, and end traverse the same loop. Memories flood my being at the strangest times. My orbit buzzes with scattered moments, a solar system of burning starts, and depleted moons, and coveted suns, and undiscovered planets.

At the age of 30, I am besotted with life.

But I am also an adult – a true adult that has survived the many false summits of adulthood that characterize the 20s. Sometimes, I feel so tired and ache in strange places. Sometimes, being so keyed into the news and the playground of politics drags me down and makes me feel uncomfortably level. Not high, not low, just level.

Level 30 is where the realness of life and responsibility hit like a bulldozer. It’s also the point of living when the multitude of selves cross paths, and the dormant child within takes control. What’s promised is a year of youth and grounded gratitude.

Eight years ago, I wrote a blog post about the importance of living young. Although I rarely read my own writing as it generally makes me cringe (a writer’s curse, I suppose) this sentence still speaks to me:

When you’re a kid, you live in a state of what would be described in adulthood as ignorance. But when you’re a kid, it’s not ignorance. It’s burrowing in the pockets of good before you trip over the stitches of bad. 

The child in me is coming around to the way of life in the neighborhood of 30, burrowing in pockets and tripping over stitches simultaneously.

Although, as a perennially absent blogger, I don’t deserve it, I hope you’ll continue to visit me in this virtual neighborhood. I’m coming around to the idea of using my pen (more like keyboard) as a compass once again, if I can only figure out why my thumb is randomly twitching…

Welcome to the neighborhood!

Anna