Well, so I actually turn 25 today. Today is my 25th trip around the sun. I’ve been around for about 9100 days now, meaning in 2-3 years I’d have been around for 10,000 days. But all of these are just numbers. Regardless, I found myself waking up remarkably early today, just because I suppose I was a little excited about the idea that it was my birthday. There’s nothing particularly special I had in mind. I choose to spend the morning eating McDonald’s in bed with my wife and we watched many episodes of Arrested Development together and it was really pleasant. I’m just resting and relaxing. It was raining. It’s been several hours since, and now I feel like I’d like to do some writing, so here I am.
I was thinking that if it’s my birthday I should just do whatever I’d want to do. And I asked myself, what do I really, realy want to do for my birthday? I suppose I’d like to watch a good movie. But I’ve already spent a bunch of time staring at images on a screen. I might go for a run later. I’ve been tempted to smoke but I’m going to deliberately choose not to. Just because these little choices feel arbitrarily more significant than on any other day. I’ll look back and think about how I spent my 25th birthday, and think of it well. That’s the hope, at least. I don’t particularly look back on any of my previous birthdays with a lot of clarity, though it’s entirely possible that that might simply be because I’ve never put a lot of effort into my birthdays. I just sort of allow them to pass.
A part of me was thinking that I’d really like to get A LOT of word vomits done today. Like, it’s my birthday, my wife is happy to let me do whatever I like, and as a person who thinks of himself as a writer, it would be nice to get a lot of writing done today. Just for… symbolic reasons, I guess? I know that my current “record” for most number of word vomits done in a day still lingers between 10 and 13. Ten thousand words seems to be my max. But I’ve not given it a better effort yet, all of my (few) prior efforts have been rather sparse, unfocused. I’m pretty sure I could get up to 20,000 words in a day. But that might require me to start early in the morning, rather than at 4pm in the afternoon. I’m not sure. We could give it a shot. Maybe we could go up to 15. That would be interesting, no?
While we’re on the subject of birthdays, I find myself thinking about what it was like to be me when I was younger. I was looking at some pictures and Facebook statuses from my older days, and I see a kid who was skinny, needier, perhaps less comfortable in his skin then than I am now. I do feel more comfortable now, and I think having a home has played a significant role in that. I’m not as fit as I’d like to be, but I don’t think I fidget or clam up as badly as I used to. I think those are good steps in the right direction. I’d just like to move faster. I feel like I’m going slow, and I feel like I’m not paying a lot of attention even though I talk about it a lot.
So there are a unch of possible solutions, right? Or possible interpretations. One is that I think I’m trying but I’m not really trying, and I should just try more, try harder, try properly. Another is that I’m actually trying too hard, and that trying too hard is exhausting and I should just let go and let things sort of happen in a mindful way. I think there is some validity to both answers, I think I don’t have as much mindfulness in my life as I ought to. It’s not that I work very hard or that I don’t work hard enough– I don’t even really know most of the time what state I’m actually in. I sort of rely on the outcome and my feelings to tell me how things are going. I’m tired and I’ve been at work for a long time, it must mean that I’ve been working hard. But that’s mostly busyness most of the time– it’s me trying to bang my head against a problem, or trying to win just by showing up and lingering. And yes, showing up is a huge part of solving any problem, but that’s not the only part, is it? There’s a lot more to it.
Or rather, “showing up” isn’t a single event– it’s an endless, infinite, recursive set of events within events. Yes, I have to show up to work, but then at work I have to show up to the task at hand. I showed up to my keyboard and I’m writing, but I should also show up in my head, show up to my thoughts, show up to my feelings, so on and so forth. There’s many levels of awareness, many levels of presence, and I suppose that’s what I need to be more mindful of. I can’t keep languishing in self-pity and keep trying to squeeze out more praise from things that I’ve already done. I’m 25 years old now. I can’t keep hoping that mommy or daddy or senpai is going to recognize me. I have to recognize myself. I have to provide my own internal validation. I have to assemble and direct my own life, and I can’t keep hoping that other people will validate me for it. I mean, I consider the feedback of thoughtful, intelligent people to be a sign that things are going well, but the point is to focus on making things go well– not trying to squeeze positive feedback out of people who aren’t volunteering it. That’s a surprisingly challenging… challenge.
Happy 25th, Visa.