1976, A Vintage Year

I am thirty years old today. It sounds cliché but it feels like a substantial amount of years, for the first time. I guess having the prefix twenty, even in the number twenty-nine makes it appear younger or not as substantial, if that makes sense. Part of me feels strange at thirty, like I am trying to be something I am not. Most of me feels elated that I have finally escaped all those decade where people still held me by the neck with their criticisms and expectations and lives that are more together than mine...

I feel very distinct and individuated and myself. Not suddenly, of course. It’s a process that’s been happening since my late twenties. For a while now I have been coming back into the limits, the comforting limits, of being myself: no real judgements, no self-hate that really moves me to do any harm, just you know a bunch of stuff that is going on, just life. It’s almost as if you spend a ton of years in this twilight zone state of thinking you’re getting past something to get to something. When you are young and without proper guidance and proper love and you do the whole chicken with head cut off thing, with seemingly no end in sight, because that's the only way to live and to learn. Everything is: a process, a depression, a struggle, a growing up, a realization, an epiphany, this relationship, that one, this thing with your mother, that close call, this thing with your friends, the getting past it, the getting better, the reporting on it, the tracing your point A’s to point B’s, the accounting for the way that you were, the way that you are, the making promises about the way you’re gonna be, espousing all kinds of travel metaphors for life.

Then one day there is a shift that begins subtly, very subtly in the way you understand your life. I bet a lot of it comes from your being exhausted from doing the other way, honestly. And you come to realize you’re not getting past anything to get to anything, you’re just passing through, you’re just being the you that you are, in the time and place that you are. And barring some terrible things preventing that from happening, you should be very happy and most satisfied to be who you are in the time and place that you are. And then you realize this is The Prize. Not so much the prize of the accomplished or the beautiful or the succesful or the rich or the famous or the happy ever after people or whatever (though you would love all of that, of course) but the prize of the children, the gift of those first acquainted with life. Kids get it; they get that life is about living. Since they say in Cape Verde and other places that very old people are in a childish state (we call it meninencia, from the word menine, for child), growing up and maturing may be this journey back into parts of the child’s original spirit. Granted I don’t mean to say that we, certainly that I, become child-like or even carefree or even young in spirit. I don’t feel young, but I’ve only felt young in retrospect anyway… I mean that maybe when we start to mature, we turn our faces in the direction of acceptance and self-contained ease, and that those are traits kid traits, at least before the world tries to fuck with them. And I don’t think children are super naturally amazing beings, in fact I know they are very fragile in their apparent resilience--I just think that they are at ease with what they are here to do, originally. They are at peace with the comforting limits and the possibilities, they are content to just live and find happiness and others like them to be happy with. Unlike what it looks like, their pursuit is profound, it’s not simplistic, because seeking to be happy is profound and not simplistic, and because they live to grow. The whole point of a child's life, often superficially measured in inches of height and ouces of weight and numbers of words spoken and spelled, is to take in the life that is theirs. This is such a long, long way from the days of throwing up my life away.

That said, a very special young person, speaking of the spirit of youth, who I worked with and I guess mentored (that’s how she would put it; I’m still getting used to that idea) wrote me this card, not knowing it was my birthday, just to thank me. The card was amazing, and had a Jack Kerouac quote which she said made her think of me. And to that I say Let’s Hope So:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…

-Jack Kerouac