A friend turned 30. It was kind of an existential birthday for him.
I told him, “I have T-shirts older than you.” (It’s true.) But I also remember 30 being the closing of the door of my extended adolescence and the gateway to official adulthood and an existential rite of passage.
He asked, “What should I be learning in my 30’s?”
I’m nearly 70. Here’s some things I wish someone had told me. Maybe I might have printed them out and hung them on my refrigerator for the next 40 years and found some grounding in them as I lived through the turmoils of my 30’s, 40’s and 50’s… even if I had no clue what they meant on my 30th birthday:
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Step out of your self-imposed box, but don't become an aimless burden on others.
Step away from others’ expectations, but don’t wholesale reject their knowledge of you and their counsel. Even your “unwise enemies” get SOMETHING about you right.
Learn stuff you never dreamed of knowing or being interested in without having a "career objective".
Engage the present moment and person before you, and let it take you where ever it goes even if it goes somewhere difficult to navigate.
Learn new boundaries (closer or farther) from your present moments’ journeys.
Have relationships with people outside of your comfort zones, but don't let them define you.
Learn to be OK alone and in a crowd.
Learn how to be grateful and gracious even for expected things.
Learn how to do a good thing without an agenda, expectation, or acknowledgment: then, tell no one about it.
Learn how to see “the long run”.
Learn there IS a long run and learn how to wait for it and be in it without bitching about your life before it happens.
Start working on your family: Of origin, and if married, your spouse and kids. It’s complicated, and intertwined, and more of a mirror and force than you suspect. You won’t really get it until you’re 50 (if ever), but start taking it seriously now.
Set goals, but don’t look at them like a marriage. A divorce from them is not a mortal sin (though there might be back child support payments).
Food and shelter trump your ego regardless of how what you did to pay for them looks on Linked-In resume bullet points.
Learn how to take a defeat without catastrophizing it.
Learn how to wait. Even in a catastrophe.
Learn how to love. Even in a catastrophe.
But learn the difference between love and co-dependence and enabling in a catastrophe.
Learn to be yourself, but also learn whether or not yourself is someone you should be.
Learn to play. Seriously.
Learn to work. Seriously.
Learn to pay attention: small things matter. More than you know. In every aspect of your life.
Learn that the “Big Picture” is much bigger than you imagine or can control. Don’t make it your focus to the neglect of what you can control.
If you pray, pray as you can, not as you think you should. Guilty prayers are heard for certain, but desperate prayers are mostly the ones answered in the Gospels.
Learn that God is always outside the walls of your box, not within them… and your discomfort may be “faith” not necessarily “apostasy”.
Be careful what boxes you buy to put God in. It’s a marketplace and people sell what you’re looking for. Usually you’re buying one that you fit in, not God.
Find your faith. But don’t take what you’ve found as “Truth”. It will change. Trust me.
End your days, insofar as possible, with no regrets. Even if there is still turmoil, with the peace you know you did the right thing.
And in the end… no matter what you think you know, or what you know, you’re going to screw it up and your peace and life and salvation is about the love you showed to people who maybe didn’t get it when you showed it, and the forgiveness you showed to those before you, and the forgiveness you receive from those you tried to love the best you could with what you had within you.
If I live to be 80, I might add more, but this is all I have for now.
And I’ll have a T-shirt hanging in my closet that’s older than your parents by then…..
Really good objectives in life. A few of them I won't try to embrace, as they run sideways of my autistic self. In all really good though.
well stated. I am the same age, have often thought that I might have benefited from some of these insights through the years. I was all too often convinced that I was doin' everything right. I had to be 'right' because I was trying really hard to follow Jesus.