Thoughts on the new year

I like the acknowledgment of a year's passing because it forces me to reflect on what I would like to do with the upcoming year, an opportunity to reassess how I'm living. 

Motivation

I've been thinking a lot about long fears of mine - passivity and life passing without my being more intentional and courageous about it. Making ideals become reality requires hard work, clarity, investment, and planning, to some extent, and the rest is perhaps fortuitous. Over Thanksgiving break, my siblings sat around the table and agreed upon a tentative date for a family vacation in Yellowstone. We had heard that it would require a year in advance reservation. It was a reminder to me a lesson from a time management book I read once - activities that are important to you will not occur accidentally. You need to make space for them, prioritize them. So whether it be planning for trips that are important to me, activities like get-togethers, or relationships that I want to cultivate, I'd like to know for myself what they are, who those people are, and then be better prepared to go for them.

Regrets from the past

I think upon turning 30, that I was made aware of the time that had passed and the short span of time I have left. For some people, turning 30 was shocking. I think what was most resonant for me was what feels like wasted time in my twenties, time wondering what my purpose was, pressure that I should be doing something more important and working towards it, time wasted with paralyzing social anxiety, insecurity (as in low self-confidence), and warrant-less fear. I was telling a friend recently about this crisis in my mid-twenties, right before I left DC, and saying that maybe it is something that we all need to reach at some point. I wish I had known what I know now sooner - the skills I have since learned about living in the present and how to diminish myself and life less. 

On getting older

Being 30 is scary in other ways too. Our culture suggests that we have or are reaching the peak of youth, beauty, health, before we begin to age. This is my last decade to have my own children. With age discrimination, this is the best time to make career and professional moves while I'm still considered relatively young on the career ladder and less senior. And I'm frequently afraid of physically "settling down." Living in Mexico was one of the most enlivening times of my life, second to living in DC. 

(When I revisit DC sometimes I get emotional and have trouble expressing why. I think it is because I feel a loss for a significant period of time when I was of a certain age and when the lives of people I knew were at a certain place, when it all coincided and we were young and struggling to come into our own selves and sharing all of this. It was a place that I thought was beautiful in its own way, with the connected town houses, with the spacious landscape of the monuments, with seasons and little details like waiting for the bus on a cold winters day. Maybe mostly I associate it with the painful angst that I had during that time. On a recent work trip, I bought art of a neighborhood I used to live in. I stayed up that night just staring at the artwork because I knew exactly the location where an art piece was done and it evoked memories of my walking home. I consider DC as being one of the first places where I began to live a life outside the institutional educational structure and I got to know a place, its restaurants, bar, places to walk, and I also worked on friendships and began my first relationships. 

With Mexico, I wrote an essay about it when I left. It was very emotional for me to leave a place where I was so interested in learning more about. I still remember a night where it dawned on me and where I told my mom, probably about 6 months in, that I didn't want to leave it yet because it would have felt premature - there was much yet to see.)

I have thought that I want that experience of Mexico again and maybe it's a false belief that I can only get that by living abroad again. Maybe instead, I need to make Los Angeles be that experience for me now. I used to feel proud of the fact that I better embraced where I lived, but now I don't feel that involved in outside activities and the community that make the place.

The other part of my new year's resolution is to work on being more confident. It's an area of self-growth that I have revisited time and again. I'm not as bad as I once was, but I refer to making the most of a situation when I'm in it. This means everything from speaking up, asking questions that I would like answers to - professionally or socially, expressing my opinion, reaching out to people or organizing activities, networking, and dating. I think this is related to my also taking better care of myself, from my appearance, being in good shape (one new year's resolution is to strengthen my core and work on weight lifting in general), dressing well, and I suppose in other ways too - intellectually (have started using the public library more) and spiritually. 

Here's to a new year and the year in which I'm 30. I hope more good things will come and that I will take advantage of the short time that I have, week by week.