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On turning thirty-eight; being a student of myself

Just as I did at the similarly-arbitrary age of 34, as I breach 38, I realize I’m well on the other side of mid-thirties, and feeling the inexorable pull of 40. Although in honesty, being 40 is perhaps not as much the knoll of terminal decline I once feared it to be, more something to be regarded as a time of personal evolution and peace with ourselves.

Approaching middle-age represents a line in the sand of my life; bestowed with so much more self-knowledge with which to finally start putting myself where I know is best for me; to feel most at ease, valuable, creative. And know how to nurture an inner peace.

I’m called to take stock; and use the knowledge I have gained of myself and my practice in boundaries and resilience, to limit the ways in which the world can negatively impact my emotional state.

I increasingly understand how to move in the world and protect my emotional equilibrium through my choices. It’s everything; what media I consume, what I expose myself to, or where I physically put myself, and often most difficult, who I choose to be around.

As we get older, this is a destructive process, and involves a degree of being honest, and letting go of what was helpful or previously represented myself, but I need to let go of to grasp the artifacts of the evolution of one’s identity from here.

To have new habits, new interests and an evolving personality, requires sacrificing what has served us, but we must choose to no longer bring on our journey.

My twenties and thirties have always felt so uncertain, marked by lack of confidence and a frustrating lack of self-assuredness bringing an undue weight and hesitance to every decision. I feel I was always just approaching the feedback I felt I needed to feel at peace, but am understanding the world and others will not - and cannot give us this, and instead we must choose to embody and act according to our intuition and knowledge of ourselves, as we are our own highest authority.

This chaos to which we attempt to bring form and certainty, rather than an aberration; is in the nature of the world and impacts everyone we think is immune to its effects, and in order to progress and grow, we must act despite this. To trust in the knowing we have, having done the miles in our character, and each have first-hand self-knowledge and observed the repeated patterns of the world at large; and its reaction to our own presence and actions.

There are no certainties, no perfect and complete information, and a bewildering and ever-growing map of possibilities for us as we encounter new ideas and inspiration. We must choose despite this. We do not have as long as we think.

Perhaps, the only certainty we do have, is that staying stuck, creatively, physically, or in our views of ourselves which are not helpful - stalled by the accumulated ideas we gather and not allowing the world to shape us creatively - we risk not pursuing anything new which leads to that lack of fulfillment and the tragedy of an undifferentiated life.