After Twenty-Five (Assuming Abundance)

Hi friends! I turn twenty-seven today, and it felt like a fitting time to post this reflection on what my mid-twenties have felt like. I crossed the big frontal-lobe-development a couple years now, and I think I’m starting to see some of the ways my thinking has shifted. More thoughts after the poem.

The tide turns after twenty-five. I lose
My footing, scrabbling at the shallow shelf
Where I’ve tried to stake out a life.
Siren songs and salt spray whistle at me
While I fight the waves. But there’s no fighting
Forever. I’d like to say I arc backward
In a graceful flip, but it’s all choking and churning
In the washing machine of deep-sea swells.
Past the breakers, I come up for breath amid schools
Of silver tuna. The floor is too far to try for.
My arms and legs tread in rhythmic freedom,
All the waters of the world passing over them.
Here’s another metaphor: After twenty-five,
I start to sow different seeds. I lay aside
Lanky poplars, spearing high heaven in their zeal.
Now I pat the earth around sycamore embryos,
Whisper to grow wide, wide, wider still.
I plant an arbor of redwoods, unafraid now
Of what will outlive me. I am learning
To stretch my hopes across decades, to assume
Abundance, to bank on breath after breath.
I long for canopies and legacies. The hope of eternity
Lodges like a bullet on its way to my heart.

Time used to terrify me. I felt it like manacles, always dragging me down, or like a sinister pursuer, breath on the back of my neck. Ever since I had to take unexpected, unwanted gap years, I have felt behind. Behind my peers, behind where my parents were at my age, behind where I thought I’d be. And it’s not just about how I measure up to expectations about life milestones; it’s about the many things I want to do with my life that seem to fall out of my pockets like sand with every passing minute. I told a professor in undergrad that I already feel like I'm running out of time to do all that I want, and he said, that’s how driven people feel. He said that he feels the same panic about time, but his wife doesn’t—and that she enjoys life much more.

Maybe it was my Do Hard Things high school formation (iykyk), but I have always expected of myself to do great things while young. Whether that was publish a book or make some important list or get some fancy degrees, there’s this quiet, relentless pulse inside me to do the things, and do them quickly, before they stop being impressive. I suppose some people would say I have done those things, or versions of them. But as each year passes and with it the chance of being a prodigy or wunderkind, I have tended to feel more adrift, wondering what it is exactly I’m doing with my life. Would my high school self be disappointed in me? Would she think I've settled? Have I become that boring adult that forgets what it felt like to want to change the world?

Well, maybe I have, and maybe there’s a reason people tend to mellow with age and resize their ambitions, because to live like there’s a hunt behind you is exhausting. I don’t want to race through my life. I want to enjoy it. And though high school Aberdeen might say that I’d given up on some dreams, I’d tell her that a more expansive view of time is letting me dream in ways she couldn’t. I have a new dream: instead of a PhD by thirty, I want to take my twenties to learn the biblical languages, my thirties to dive deeper into various field of theology, and my forties to integrate all my other interests—art, science, anthropology—into that textually grounded theology. The point isn’t that I have to follow that trajectory exactly but that now I can dream through decades, not despite them. The thought of it taking years to master a thing is no longer so scary. It actually gives me hope.

Turning twenty-five horrified me because I couldn’t say early twenties anymore. Twenty-six just cemented that feeling: my gosh, I’m basically thirty!

But twenty-seven is different. Part of it is the math—I still have three whole years until thirty. That feels like a lot. I don’t know why the four last year felt more significant, but I’m hoping it has to do with me finally seeing time a bit more realistically. Twenty-six is not basically thirty. Thirty is not a death sentence. And there are some gifts only time can give.

Here’s to the old trees, the slow growth, the release of the need to touch the ocean floor, the many currents of the wide, wide sea. I can’t wait for the Aberdeen twenty-seven years from now to read this and laugh, knowing so much better the abundance that has always surrounded her.

to staying awake,

Aberdeen