39 thoughts on turning 39
or, you're fundamentally okay as a person
- It occurs to me that if I want to do a post like this next year, and the year after that, I’ll have to come up with 40 and then 41 things, and so on, and I might one day wonder why I ever thought this was a good idea.
- But then again, if you stop to think about it, you definitely have more than 39 stray thoughts in your head every day.
- Maybe not all of them are worth noting. Probably not all of them are worth noting. But you have to note them first to decide if they are.
- That propensity to notice, to reflect—that self-reflexivity—is definitely something I’ve gained only in this latter half of my 30s.
- I started writing Morning Pages when I was 33. With the exception of times when I’m travelling, and I give myself permission to take a break from all my usual routines, I have kept it up every single day since 2018. That’s six years of writing three pages a day by hand, almost every day.
- I also started doing regular daily journalling in 2022. I keep my journal in a plain text file that is synced everywhere so it is totally future proof. I love my plain text journal. I can so easily find out what I did on any day or search it to find how many times I’ve been to a restaurant or the last time I met a friend.
- Digression 1: I’ve always enjoyed tinkering with tech, which means also that I’ve experimented with a lot of ways to keep this journal, including dedicated journalling apps like Day One, Diarly and Apple’s new Journal app. But I keep coming back to plain text. Derek Sivers sums up the reasons well in Write Plain Text Files.
- End digression: all this to say, I could wish I’d journalled more or written daily when I was younger, and that way I’d have many more years of reflections to look back on, but I also think that this was a practice I needed to be older to appreciate. I needed to have my twenties and my thirties to look back on to understand the value of looking back.
- I have come to believe that reflection is where everything begins.
- That, and good sunscreen. Seriously, that sunscreen song had it right. Trust me on the sunscreen.
- There are many exhortations on how to live better, and the term itself takes many forms, like “self-improvement” and “lifehacking”.
- But I keep running up against a problem with this terminology, which is that it always presumes we start from a place of scarcity. That our lives can be improved, hacked, or bettered in some way.
- This is really a language problem that gives rise to a philosophical one. I tried to come up with a less judgemental way to say “living better”, and I couldn’t. Every way to frame it involves some kind of comparison, like you start from Baseline 0 and you move up to Level 1, which is objectively better than Baseline 0.
- Digression 2 (speaking of language): I have always loved learning languages, even if I don’t feel like I ever reached mastery of any of my secondary languages. And I think this conundrum here highlights something about language that I love mulling over, which is that the words we have at our disposal play such a huge and unseen role in our framing of the world. How do we understand something if we don’t have the words for it?
- But you know what I mean by living better, intuitively, even if the terminology doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It could be small things, like waking up refreshed after a good night’s sleep, or getting all your socks folded and organised in a manner that is pleasing to you. It could be much larger things, like changing jobs or moving countries because you’ve found something that makes you feel more alive.
- I don’t disagree that most (if not all) of us feel like we could live better by some measure or other.
- I disagree that we start from a place of scarcity. I disagree that where we are now is broken and in need of improvement.
- Which brings us back to reflection, and baselines, and where everything begins. The thing about better is, you cannot possibly understand what it is unless you know where you’re starting, and you cannot possibly know where you’re starting without the kind of conscious reflection that takes most of us (certainly me) decades of our lives to learn.
- And once you identify your baseline, you have to accept, and embrace, that you are fundamentally okay as a person right where you are. You do not have to do anything further with your life to earn your place in this world. You are already more than enough.
- “In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognising abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires.” (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass)
- I believe we start from a place of abundance. And it is only when we recognise that, when we are not desperately reaching for some nebulous more in a bid to prove ourselves worthy, that we can be honest about what we’d like to do with our lives.
- This could probably have been a prose post instead. But I just like lists. They make my brain hum happily, and give me space to insert small side thoughts like this one.
- The idea of lifehacks is very appealing because it implies that a small and easily implemented trick of some kind can improve your life. I think the real truth is, the three things that will most vastly improve your life are sleep, nutrition and exercise, and these are much less appealing to talk about because they are not fast or small hacks. They are a long game that won’t put a band-aid on anything quickly. But getting these three things right will massively transform your life.
- What have I learned from six years of morning pages, and two years of journalling? I have learned about myself. And that is worth everything.
- I have learned that I really, really like tinkering with systems. A frankly bewildering number of my morning pages are filled with nothing but me talking aloud about the latest notes app, filing system, blogging platform, or cloud storage I’ve tried. And I’ve realised that more than the tech, it is the system-building that really excites me.
- I have learned that when I don’t get enough sleep, I am near useless the next morning. Morning pages force me to reckon with that. I am so sluggish writing them that I have to face the fact of my incapacitation, and that it will affect the rest of my day, and that isn’t how I want to live.
- I have learned my own emotional triggers, the things that upset me so much that the words pour forth all over the place as water from a leaky tap. I have had to face up to how conflict-avoidant I am, how much I fear making people upset, and how poorly I enforce my boundaries in the name of people-pleasing, which has also forced me to define what those boundaries are.
- I have learned that no quantity of awards or publications will ever be enough to make me feel like a legitimate writer. I circle this drain constantly, wishing I were more prolific, wishing I could finish everything I start.
- But the me at the start of this decade would have been astounded and so proud of what I’ve achieved writing-wise. And I have to remind myself constantly that that is enough. I will always crave more outward markers of success. But none of them will make me a real writer. Only I can decide that for myself.
- And so, here I am, face to face with my baselines. The energy levels I have, on average, on any given day. The free time that I can carve out and how I want to portion it. My baseline mood. The things that matter to me—where my priorities really lie.
- I sometimes wonder how it is that I managed to write so much while studying, and now I don’t. But the answer is simple, really: I have other priorities.
- When I was studying, I gave up whole weekends to do nothing but write. I gave up time for other hobbies, I gave up time with friends and family, and I definitely gave up sleep. I told myself I could do this for three years, and I did. But it wasn’t something I could do for the rest of my life.
- I haven’t always been fine with that. I’ve been through my share of creative angst about writing so much less than I used to. I think I’m fine now, though, because this is my baseline of existing as a human being, and it is okay.
- Are you hydrated right now? Are you sitting up straight with good posture? Have you taken a few deep breaths lately? Do all of that, if you’re in a place where you can.
- Get up. Walk around. Live.
- Ultimately, I think the best expression of living better is to recognise that you are a part of this world, that you are one of billions of living things in this living breathing world, and that there is a great wonder and energy in that connection between all living things.
- I have been infinitely blessed in so many ways—in the family and friends I have, in the safety of the roof over my head, in my health and the opportunities I have had. When I reflect on it all, I find it impossible to feel any scarcity whatsoever.
- I’m fundamentally okay.
- And so are you.
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