Keep the Course, 32
Hello 32, it’s 31—the last fleeting hours of it, tucked up in the quiet of your childhood bedroom. After a year in which life barely seemed to stop, these past months have been quiet, at least relatively so. At times, it has felt almost a failure on my status as an adult to be back here, sharing three meals a day with my parents, watching the current students of my alma mater trek one way in the morning and back mid afternoon.
But it may have been exactly what I needed: enough familiarity and routine for everything of the past year, two even, to resonate and settle. All that I’ve learned, and seen. All that I’ve come to understand about the course of my life, and what the next branches of it might hold. To begin to think of future not as a series of one event after another, but of a tangible thing, rooted in a place to call home, and cultivated by the fruits of my talents, experiences, and the wonderful people I’ve collected along the way.
Besides, I will not be stuck in this house much longer. The next great opportunity is on the horizon, and it is daunting. But it is needed. It has been a long time since I’ve been properly challenged, and I can feel myself already itching to rise to it.
And then beyond. Today, I mapped out the next 12 months in colourful blocks upon a page: the things that are certain take up around two-thirds of the it; the rest is speculation, manifestation, planning, or some combination of the three.
Looking over those 12 months, I confirmed a truth I’ve perhaps long known, but that I have only slowly been allowing myself to believe: that I have set a course. That I have been on that course for a decade, more, without acknowledging its presence, acting as though it was all random happenstance and spontaneous choice, and not the path that was always meant for me.
Perhaps it’s been hard to believe because it isn’t the one I understood to be for me, as a child, when I dreamed of the great wild future of adulthood. It isn’t quite the one that my parents took, nor my siblings—for it wouldn’t be, for I am me, and they are them. It isn’t the one most of my friends have taken, as I watch them marry, and have children, and form lives in partnerships with stable careers and a permanent addresses.
There are parts of that I want, of course. There are parts of that I need, and will certainly achieve (there is a large bucket in 2027 marked as house hunting that is, as far as I’m concerned, a nonnegotiable task for next year). And there are parts that may come to me, or may not. And for the first time in my life, I am comfortable with the possibility that they are just that: a possibility. I am comfortable that if they don’t come to me, I will still lead a full and wonderful life, surrounded by love, and community, in other ways.
So keep the course, 32. Because happiness is available to you any day you choose to see it. Don’t waste time peering over other people’s fences when the party is in full swing in your own back garden.
