Aging Is Distressing

This Thursday, June 21st, will mark 5 months until I turn 30.  THIRTY.  3.  0.  Three decades of life.  How can this be?  There are certain aspects of my life where I feel as though this milestone is appropriate.  For instance, my time spent staying in on the weekends far exceeds the time spent staying out until God knows when bar hopping.  And when I do make it out, my head turns into a 500-pound pumpkin and wants to hit the table no later than midnight.  Hangovers are deadly and take days to get over.  The appearance of new wrinkles sends me into a tailspin.  Said wrinkles have forced me to add a half hour to my nightly routine applying anti-aging crap, which then forces me to deduct a hefty portion from my paycheck by spending money on products that guarantee to revert my skin back to the way it looked at 16.  Our culture blows my mind.  We'll believe anyone who utters the words, "30 days till younger looking skin."  I digress.

Along with all of these attributes that make me feel as though turning 30 is logical, there are several that make it hard to believe.  No, I'm not married and don't have children, but shockingly those aren't what I find myself fixated upon.  I guess that may be a part of the uncertainty as a whole, but mainly I have felt myself stressing about needing to know who and what I want to be when I grow up.  I know the quarter life crisis is inherent for most 20-somethings, but aren't all the life crises based on a 100 year scale?  If so, I should be well past these issues and well on my way to achieving all of the goals I'm meant to achieve as the happy person I'm meant to be.  I'm supposed to have "found myself," if you will.  I always scoffed at the people that used this phrase.  You know, the ones that went off to Montana or some other mid western state to work on a ranch rather than take the obvious, and in my mind at the time, only next step of attending the state school whose football team you liked the most or where all of your friends were attending.  The irony of this is hilarious because honestly when I look back now that 10 or so years have rolled past, it seems as though those people did in fact benefit from that "time out" from life.  Was what I perceived as laziness actually maturity?  In most cases, I think so.  There were the occasional people who claimed to be finding themselves who were actually just wandering around the country following Phish or Widespread on their parents' dime. 

I look back now and I feel as though a lot of the choices and decisions I've made have been so arbitrary.  My first decision to go to Auburn and pursue architecture because I loved perspective drawing and had a creative mind was well thought out and made sense.  However, I got lazy and made up some excuse as to why that wasn't the correct path for me.  After drifting around campus I chose to go with marketing.  It was such a random decision.  I simply wanted to be done with college.  It's as if it didn't occur to me that this was what I would be doing for the rest of my life so I best enjoy it. 

I guess that's another joy that comes along with getting older.  We look back and we regret some of the decisions that we made in our youth and vow to do things differently.  But it never really ends does it?  We are constantly faced with obstacles we've never been faced with before that come along with all the varying stages of life.  The only thing I can hope for is that I have learned from these decisions and have been equipped with the knowledge to take on the next hurdle life throws.  Some of us are dealt more bad hands than others.  There's no doubt about it.  And even though it's terrible and you think the world is out to get you, I can't help but feel as though it's a blessing in disguise.  If you think about it, people who are dealt all of these bad hands have to go through a lot more than the others, but doesn't that mean they are given the ability to learn and grow from what these experiences teach them?  I feel as though this would, in turn, bring more wisdom and clarity.  It might be a stretch, but it makes sense.  There have been people in my life who have been dealt very poor hands and they are some of the most positive people I know.  I respect these people more than words can express because it may be easy to put into words, but always looking on the bright side of life is not an easy thing to do.

I'm a positive person by nature.  I try to be at least.  I realize I'm not always going to make the right decision.  Everything is not always going to work out perfectly, but it can ware you down.  I do know that.  However, dwelling on things you can't control can't make it any easier, right?  The best thing we can do is learn from what we've been through, try to repair as much as we can, and live the best life we can live because what they tell us is true.  It really is the only one we have.  We can't let the poor decisions and bad hands we've been dealt affect the rest of our lives in a negative way because what good would that do?  We can't let the possibility of happiness pass us by because we're stuck in the past.