all is well
As my 30th birthday approaches, I thought to write what was the most significant teaching for each year in my twenties.
Year 20 - You’re beginning to notice how what you think appears in the external. You don’t really understand it but you begin to question everything. You learn it is best to question everything and form your own truth even when you don’t know anyone who understands you.
Year 21 & 22 - You’re spending a lot of time alone. You sit quietly most days after class and work, closing your eyes. This process feels lonely but you learn that in loneliness, you find more of yourself and inadvertently feel less alone.
Year 23 - You’re moving to a new country for the first time by yourself. It feels like you're swinging from one trapeze to the next, and just as you let go, you’re suspended in mid-air hoping you’ll catch the other side. You experience in just one moment what it is to risk everything and let go of the known. You learn the best decisions come from letting go and moving into the unknown.
Year 24 - Now you’ve finished University and you’re thinking about what to do with your life. You consider the conventional path. The editor at Vogue has read your writings, enjoys them, and wants to give you work opportunities. Times Magazine has called you back after sending your writing samples through yet you realize deep down inside that none of this is what you really want. You walk away knowing you just have to follow your heart no matter the cost. Stay true to yourself. Stay so true to yourself even when it doesn’t make sense.
Year 25 - You’re asking the question, “What really matters?” so loudly that they’re the only three words that seem to exist in your head. You’re reading a lot of books and trying to find answers. The one that arises is compassion. You learn that compassion is the starting point of everything that is wise and healing.
Year 26 & 27 - You propel yourself into the arms of Asia again. You learn how quickly life can change. You remember this when you feel stuck. You meet someone who changes your life forever. You learn what love isn’t — expecting, demanding, controlling, or forcing.
Year 28 - You’re living on an island and have a fancy villa in the rice fields and everyone sees it as paradise except you. You realize everything easy and fancy isn’t deep and meaningful but you do grow an incredible attachment to a cat. You don’t want to live on the island anymore but you realize you have to if you want to keep the cat. Then the cat dies so young and seemingly out of nowhere and you finally learn what love is — the energy that sets you free. You leave the island and never look back. You keep the cat in your heart.
Year 29 - The rug is pulled beneath your feet and you live into the fears that live inside your mind — particularly what it is to be lied to and cheated. What you thought you knew isn’t what’s true and you have to reassess what’s true. Your experiences teach you to tell the truth no matter how scary it can be. You learn that there can’t be peace unless there’s truth and fear is just a rope that appears as a venomous snake but you’ll only come to know this the closer you get to it. So don’t turn away, run, or hide.
And you also learn that heartbreak strengthens your capacity to love if you let it because still within a breaking heart, there remains a love unbroken. So you choose to go on loving every time no matter what happens. You make it the best choice of your life and you fear less because of it.
By Year 29, you understand that life is moving, transient, ever-shifting, and evolving. There’s no time to waste and yet there is an eternity that lives inside each of us. To know what is within is the most extraordinary gift we could give our one life.