“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” ~Ferris Bueller
Image courtesy of Master isolated images / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Today I am 38-years-old. 38. Thirty-eight. XXXVIII.
How did I get to 38? I swear I just turned 30. That’s what it feels like. I remember my 30th birthday. I spent it with friends, I ate Thai food for the first time, I drank too much (and yet surprisingly kept the Thai food down). I remember thinking I was glad my 20’s were over and I was entering a new phase of my life.
I’m not worried about turning 38. I’m worried that I don’t remember how I got to 38. That the last eight years are a total blur and I’ve spent the better part of a decade with my head down.
Wait…am I having a mid-life crisis? At 38? That can’t be right…can it?
Lately, I have been questioning everything. From, “why am I here?” all the way to “why do I always put my socks on last?” (The answer to that one is because I hate socks and would rather be bare foot, so I delay putting them on as long as I can). I feel like a lot of the decisions I have made have been unconscious. Life my life has happened to me rather than having created it for myself. My life hasn’t exactly turned out as planned, but then again, I never really planned anything to begin with.
Whenever I am asked where I see myself in five years I never have an answer, and if I do it is always, ALWAYS career related. People I know have one-year plans, five-year plans, ten-year plans! At 30 I couldn’t have told you what I was having for dinner that night, let alone what I wanted to accomplish in the next ten years. At 38, I still don’t know what I’m having for dinner tonight nor do I know what I want to accomplish in the next ten years. I don’t want to be saying the same thing at 48.
So on this my 38th birthday, I’ve started a list of things I want to accomplish by the time I’m 40-years-old. I’ve seen a few of these lists kicking around…some of them are 40 things by 40, I saw one that was 400 things by 40! I settled on 100. One hundred things I want to accomplish by the time I’m 40. One hundred is a number I think I can handle in two years. You can check out my list here.
Well I’m not getting any younger, so I guess I better get started!
Happy Friday everyone!
