Reflections at Thirty-Five
Yesterday was my thirty-fifth birthday, and the annual marking of a new year for me brought the chance to reflect a bit on where I am in life.
I've never made a very big deal of birthdays, except maybe over the past few years, with a larger group of friends. However, this year was quieter. I celebrated with someone very close to me, H., and went to the Poetry Festival on Governor's Island. I ran into some old friends, no longer so, and sat in the grass in the shade listening to poets read their work. I decided, just for my own work, it's not a poem if it takes 15 minutes to read — but I enjoyed it all still. Then we had a nice, languorous meal and watched the sun set behind the Statue of Liberty, caught the smell of campfire as evening turned to dusk, and got on the ferry back to the city before retiring for the night.
In the early morning of my birthday, something in my body pulled me, inconsiderately, out of my rest. I mistook the street lights outside for early dawn, before the clock told me it was only 3am. My mind wandered. Where am I actually going? For someone who thrives on challenges and variety in life, I'd chosen a single professional pursuit for the last decade of my life. Should I do something new? Was I stagnating? Maybe. I've never had a one- or five-year plan, like everyone says you need. I've always just had a general direction to go in, a gut feeling I faithfully followed. Only lately have I come to terms with that, and come to own it as part of my identity, whenever I feel the need to explain myself.
Later in the morning, H. and I caught a ferry to Rockaway Beach. The clouds were low, like a ceiling over the city as we got farther and farther away from its towering columns. We talked and felt the breeze and the sun as we left the clouds behind. I was tired but wide-eyed. We went past Lady Liberty again, this time closer, and then all the buildings growing smaller in Brooklyn. On the beach, we found a spot for our things and jumped in the cool water. The sun burned our skin as we talked and watched the planes overhead. At dinner, overlooking Jamaica Bay and the distant skyline tinted blue, we talked about what the year might hold. I said I hoped to accept this less-conventional life. I hoped I'd keep trusting my gut.
These days, I just tell people I meet that I'm a writer. I always have been, since I was young. Just no one ever pushed me that way, so I fostered my interests in computers, instead. It has given me a comfortable life, despite how much I despise digitizing all of humanity. Sure, time marches on and change is inevitable, but we always seem to have the biggest assholes pulling all the virtual levers that now shape so much of our reality. Of course, it is the same as always — a building goes up where there was once a public park; a Whole Foods goes up where there were once small markets. But every day I see how technology can rot culture faster than any gentrifying neighborhood, as we continue to see with the latest cash-grab, like today's “AI.” It is dispiriting, as someone who doesn't value the same things in this industry. But it also means I can keep building this tiny shack on the web; an oasis and little hidden gem for those who feel the same, and want to write about it.
And I am writing again — offline, in notebooks and on spare sheets of paper. My daily routine revolves around it. I wake and finally leave the apartment for a place to sit and write. On the walk there, I notice the light and the trees and the people and the weather. Sometimes I notice myself within it all. Then I write, maybe a journal entry or a small poem or story. Overall I still feel like I'm clearing the cobwebs, but it's all getting me somewhere.
I don't care much for the number of years I've seen, as a number. But as humans we mark each year alive with a celebration of someone, as if to say, You were born into the world on this day! We're happy for it, we're glad you're here. For me, the one celebrated this time, I'm glad to be here, too. Glad for the many lives I've lived within my one. Glad to have marked the occasion, lucky enough to not care about anything more than, I am here, and you're here with me, seeing it too.