A horizon: thirty is growing on me
Goodbye 2020, hello 30. What a strange year to end the third decade of my life. Michelle and I were going to end our twenties with a year of catching up: traveling, paying off debts, getting ready to make big changes once we both hit the big three-oh.
There were schemes for a first anniversary party to make up for our low-key elopement on the town, a NYE spectacular to welcome Michelle to her new year of 30, and a Walt Disney World Marathon and maybe a week at the Grand Polynesian if we'd been very good all year. But then a tornado, pandemic, canceled trips to Canada and California, fires, a summer of antiracist/antifascist insurrection, the world's most absurd coup, and finally a pro-racist/pro-fascist insurrection just to properly welcome us into 2021. There was more, but I must admit it was often a blur.
I can say with definite certainty this was not the way I expected to usher in my thirties...
I can also say with equal certainty that I'm not at all the person I seemed to be just ten years ago. The last 12 months especially have set many changes that have been simmering for probably about 15 years. I feel like I'm more myself than I've even been.
There remains a lot to learn and a bit of growing to do. I'm still learning and exploring and unlearning and experimenting. But I think I can say I'm finally awake, or something like it. I've found an intellectual current, a sharpened perspective, and some very good orbits to be in. Maybe I've come up the other side of a valley and am now looking out at newly expanded horizon. And now there's some stuff I'm ready to do.
Anyone who knows me knows that something I say often (typically in the thick of some good conversation or another) is "I've been meaning to write about this." I have so many things I've been meaning to write about. The future, the past, the currents that brought us here, the currents that might carry us to elsewhere. It's always felt like procrastination or laziness, but maybe I wasn't actually wasting my twenties like it sometimes felt I was. I now think I was just waiting for the ideas to proof, holding off to see if any of the seeds I'd collected would germinate before bothering to plant them in the garden.
Perhaps the time is arriving and I'm ready to start planting that garden. I can't promise that I'll get more frequent or regular with my writing. And if I do, I can't say whether it'll be interesting or even coherent. But I do suspect I'll be sharing many more of my ideas soon.
The first item on my things-to-share list is what I'm writing right now. Announcing in a somewhat vague and open-ended way that there are moves being made, and inviting you, dear reader, to get a little closer. Maybe I'm inviting you to get involved. Maybe I'm warning you to stay away! I actually don't know what all I'm going to do in the next 15 years or so, but there is a horizon and I'm casting my attention towards it. Let me know if you're seeing it too.
Justin
Seeds, currents, and orbits (?)
- 🧑🏫 Behzod Sirjani has me thinking about organizations and communities that learn.
- 💼 Anne Helen Petersen's writing about the modern worker and community.
- 📰 Looking toward the 1950s and 60s as an origin point for much of our current cultural dark matter.
- ☕️ A delightful coffee has pulled my attention west, towards Taos... and beyond.
- 👣 What happened to all the people who lived in the area we now call Nashville?