To turn 30.

They say that with age comes wisdom.  I would never presume to call myself wise, but I would like to think that after 30 years, I know a thing or two.  Life is, after all, a steadily built collection of experiences that we live through, learn from, remember, and rest against as we make our way forward.  We must live to learn; we must learn to live.

And I am an eager and devoted student.  My father has always said to me, “Be well, be learning, you are loved.”  I took him at his word.

I turn 30 today, and given the build up to this birthday, over the last few weeks, I’ve felt a burgeoning pressure to write something provocative and insightful and monumental for this milestone, this 30th birthday of mine. 

I kept thinking, “What more can I say that I haven’t already?  [Check the archives.] What great wisdoms can I impart?  [Check the favorites page.]  What do I know, really?”

I thought in poetry; I thought in fragments.   Snippets of sentimental musings came to me as I was driving home from work or walking home from yoga or reading his words.  Suddenly, the concept of “Age” was looming over me everywhere, demanding definition and personification. 

And so, ever the organized, disciplined student, I began my research. 

I asked friends what they thought of 30—interestingly (and not surprisingly) I heard a chorus of “Oh, I love my thirties!  Welcome!”

Then, I began sifting through the memory box of my mind, pulling out past birthdays:  my 16th, celebrated with just my parents and thick slices of bakery-made cake; my 21st, partying it up in Boston with my sister and one of my closest friends from college and a small handful of others; my 26th, in the arms of my then-boyfriend; my 28th, shared with two of my dearest girlfriends (whose birthdays also fall in January) and our collective circle of best friends, significant others, and family at a restaurant/bar, very aptly named 28 Degrees. 

And then, out of curiousity, I went digging through the dusty shelves of this here blog, to see what, if anything, I’d written in years past. 

First, I found this post and read it with a smile, remembering the exact afternoon I’d written that long section of my graduate school thesis.  I had cried as I’d written it, holed up in the dining room of that beautiful apartment on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC.  I had cried hard then—at the story I told and the way I told it and the way I knew my parents would perceive each paragraph and turn of phrase.  I read this post now, this piece of my thesis, and I still smile at my effort, at my honesty, at my eager attempt to understand so many things that I will never, really, understand—but I can, already, see how much the story has changed, how differently I would write it today. 

I pulled up this post next, from last year’s birthday.  I read it and remembered my sadness then, heavy and suffocating and seemingly beyond my control.  Last year was my first legitimately difficult birthday, celebrated darkly, quietly, a bit solemnly.  My life bore against me with a difficulty and despondency I hardly recognized or understood.

How time changes things.  Thankfully, time does change things.

I woke up today at 5:28 a.m., very close to the time at which I woke into this world.  I went to sunrise yoga, and I practiced, and I looked at my self in the mirror, and took in my red-rimmed eyes and my long, strong, sweat-shined body and my wet, tangled hair, and I thought, “I am 30.  I am 30.”

I thought this, and then realized that means…well, very little.  What is “30″? Look—I am still ME.  And that—that is all that matters.

As I sped into work, glancing at funny Facebook messages and listening to my family’s sweet “Happy birthday!” voicemails, I realized that it is merely the young, nostalgic, romantic part of me that wants to sit with my twenties for a long and indulgent afternoon, in a sunlit corner of my small living room, and talk through the decade that taught me how to love and how to let go, how to make a home and how to leave one, how to ruin and how to forgive, how to break and how to rebuild.  That woman within me wants to give her thanks.  She wants to weep for what’s past.

But, I won’t.  Because, at 30, I understand there is no need.  For you or for me. 

Because my life won’t change or deepen or be better upon reflection.  We live to learn—but I sit in the classroom of today, and of the future.

Because I already know the lessons I have learned thus far.  I am emboldened, ablaze, by their teachings.  

I am 30.  And, I am much more interested in the living that’s ahead rather than behind me.

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