As Through a Glass Oldly: Reflections On Turning Thirty
“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”
Ever since my 29th birthday, the idea of turning 30 greeted me often. Sometimes I was sitting on my lunch break in the summer heat, bent over in front of the truck’s air conditioner and the thought would arrive, unbidden: I’m going to be 30 soon. Sometimes I was standing in the backyard waiting for my dogs to urinate and it would strike me: I’m going to be 30 soon. Sometimes I was driving across state lines to meet with old friends and my mind would pull a simple phrase out of its bag: I’m going to be 30 soon.
And then, as I slept, it happened. Me. 30 years old.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Bathers (1765)
On Misspending Youth and the Thief of Perspective: a Defense and Polemic
Looking back on my 20’s, I see a young man taking his time. He never saved up and figured out that trip to Cuba he so desperately wanted. He never got around to publishing the books he wrote. He never made the great film or led the general strike. He spent a lot of time reading, playing games on his phone while listening to podcasts. In fact, a notable portion of his time on earth has so far been spent staring out at nothing in particular while a song plays on loop in his head.
I can see my 20’s like this. As a colossal waste of time. I can look back at my childhood plans and all the things I thought I would certainly accomplish by 30, and I can compare this list to my real accomplishments. After that, I can count all the unchecked items on the list. I can then use this number as a kind of inferiority quotient. Not only could I do that, I did — almost every time the idea of turning 30 crossed my mind in the last year.
I called friends who’d turned 30, friends who’d passed that cursed threshold months earlier or years earlier. They all said the same thing. They said it isn’t that big of a deal. They said you’ll feel the same. They said don’t worry about it. And I, in my wisdom, continued thinking of it as a very big deal, assumed that I would feel old and finished, and worried about it quite a lot.
But as my birthday drew closer, I decided on a lark to change strategy. Because why not give it the old college try, while you are still plausibly college-aged? I tried turning the perspective around. Rather than quantifying the hopes unrealized, the unmet expectations, I tried quantifying the opposite. I counted up all the things I did do. The experiences I did have. The adventures I went on, the people I knew and loved, the things I learned, the skills I mastered. What I found is interesting. The child I was had such a small conception of the life I was going to live.
A child doesn’t know enough about the human experience to see all the things they can spend a wish on. I never knew I would have the honor of giving a eulogy, of hitchhiking the country, of organizing a reading group. I never thought to hope that I would learn how to make a cashier’s day a little easier by being relaxed and complementary, that I would have to hold a friend while they cried and figure out how to support them as they recovered.
What I’m trying to say is that life is so much bigger than the viewpoint of the children we used to be. The child I used to be is not the expert on life, is not the final arbiter of accomplishment and value. The goals I made before my twenties were ignorant of an entire decade of life lessons — some of them bitterly, oh so bitterly hard in the learning. Now at 30, I don’t have to compare myself to the demands of a teenager. I don’t have to pass a test made by the kid I used to be.
Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781)
The Poison of Biography
What gives us these strange notions? For one, the younger we are, the less we understand, and the greatness that we have explained to us are of a certain kind. You can tell by the jobs children want when they grow up: astronaut (because space is cool), paleontologist (because dinosaurs are cool), marine biologist (because dolphins are cool), president (because power is cool), teacher (because they’ve actually met teachers), and whatever it is their parents do (because, again, they’ve actually met the people raising them).
And as we grow, we learn about other notable people, all through the genre of biography. In biographies, stories of people who the culture finds highly accomplished are told in just-so fashion. Moments from their childhood that echo future greatness are highlighted. People are interviewed who sagely nod their head and muse, “He was always meant to play jazz,” or “You could never get her off the tennis court.”
These are fictions built out of the remembered parts of people’s lives. Watching and reading these, a form impossible to avoid in our culture, begins a strange complex in us. Because the truth is, life is not as simple as a single track from inborn talent to vocation to world changing accomplishment. When we are living our lives, we can’t help but notice how different they feel to the great artists, leaders, scientists, and sports heroes that we’ve read about. There is confusion, boredom (oh the boredom!), depression, anxiety. We deal with double shifts, traffic jams, falling outs, arguments, addiction, and bank accounts. That reality will never compare to the lives seen through the lens of biography. And so we are led to believe that our lives are pale shadows of the best lives ever lived.
But we do not have to make this mistake. We can put away these notions of life and look at the time we have spent on this earth (which, to believe my worried mind, is a considerable amount of time). If I have anxiety about turning 30 because I think it is so old, then I must necessarily also admit that I have plenty of life experience. Such experience says this: my thirties will be bigger than I could ever dream they would be standing here at their beginning. I don’t mean bigger as in wealthier, with uninterrupted euphoria, complete with a successful campaign for President and three Super Bowl trophies. I mean bigger as in full of things I don’t even know I don’t know about yet.
Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1799)
On the Art of Goal Setting
So let us put away the past. Let us look ahead to the 30’s knowing that any goals we set will be dwarfed by the experiences that await us.
This becomes a tricky operation. Setting goals helps move us where we’d like to go, but an unrealistic goal leaves us feeling disempowered. We have to be realistic about what we are capable of and what opportunities are available.
For instance, I’m never going to do something for five hours every day even after work. I’m just not. I’m not going to magically acquire the self-discipline. Despite my constant fantasies of winning the lottery even though I never play, I can’t rely on becoming wealthy, should never pin a dream on the hopes of one day acquiring the fortune necessary. I’m not going to suddenly figure out how to do nicotine just a little bit and so avoid the need to quit for good.
The self-knowledge goes on. And while self-knowledge is not always cheerful information, it is much better to have it than to not.
There is a second kind of self-knowledge, a more secretive set of principles working underneath the chatter of consciousness. These principles are like little lanterns in the night to help traverse the path once the sun sets, before the sun rises. Principles like: always follow that pinprick of curiosity, because it is the source of secret wealth. Principles like: if I want to do something but it feels intimidating, then that is precisely what I should do next. Principles like: if a person feels untrustworthy or cruel, they likely are and will be so toward me one day.
While that is not an exhaustive list (merely an illustrative triad), it is enough to pick up on the important pattern: we have great intuitive powers. Intuition is the constant voice of wisdom, but it does not speak in English, or Farsi, or Cantonese. It speaks in feelings, whims, jokes, dreams. It speaks in the language of moods — and not always directly.
And so our goals must align with our intuition, and our plan of action must work with our attributes, not against them. These are things we can’t know until we try and fail a thousand times. And the 20’s serve as the greatest laboratory of our personal science: where we tested thousands of hypotheses and disproved a great many grand unified theories along the way.
Thomas Jones’s The Bard (1774)
And So, I Am 30
But as I write this, a part of me panics about the lateness of the hour on my inevitable march graveward. Because, of course, yes — I am closer to death than ever before. I’m not old, but I’m no longer hand-wavingly young. If there is anything I want to get in order, maybe it is time.
If there is something I feel called to do, now is not the time to wait. If there is someone I need to forgive or make laugh or thank through tears, now is the time to make the call.
We are not waiting for life, we are not preparing for life, we are not in line for life. We are alive. It might have taken me three decades to realize this, but the realization cannot wait any longer. Life isn’t something that comes, it is something that is here. Life is always with you, right up until it isn’t.
Caspar David Friedrich’s Cemetery Entrance (1825)