Re: Life / the twentieth sun

my instant impressions on turning twenty

A Night in Paris (Konstantin Korovin, 1930)

I turned twenty last week.

Sure, days and years might just be random slices of time, but this still feels significant.

When my birthday came, it felt like sitting at the ledge of a towering cliff—wind in my eyes, legs dangling over, squinting past the sun and into a blindingly large world. I never knew the turn of a single day could be so exhilarating, and so intimidating.

With a fresh decade in hand, it feels right to consider all the days that now trail behind me.

When I was a kid, I thought my voice didn’t matter.

I don’t mean this pathologically. It’s just hard to walk through your whole childhood without a sprinkling of insecurity.

As humans, we are born powerless and owe our survival to the grace of those before us. When you’re tugged by your elders through the foreign and frightening world, it’s only natural to defer to their judgment.

Their answers may not be absolute, but they are as correct as they need to be for the moment we’re in. We all grow by looking upwards, to the faces of those who raised us, by asking for a thousand permissions, by stretching our arms and stumbling towards clarity.

Adulthood is a miracle. After the blinding landscape of childhood, you find yourself at a clearing, alone. And it dawns on you that you’re approaching the age of your own parents when they had you. It occurs to you that you’re now as old as the people who had all the answers.

Somewhere, along the mist-laden trail of your life, you will step past this singularity, and life will never be the same.

I don’t mean to say you’re losing anything, either. Not at all! As your childhood flutters away, a world of finer and more fascinating things starts coming into view.

When I was a kid, I thought my voice didn’t matter. And it’s true. When you’re young, you can get away with saying nearly anything. No dream is too high-strung, no insult is too fatal to cause lasting damage. It’s a fleeting sort of invincibility: the children build and destroy everything with their words, and the adults knowingly smile on.

Adulthood, to me, is the trembling realization—and acceptance—of your power as a person.

With each month, it becomes clearer that I’m not invincible. No one is. I look around and realize that everyone is made of the same flesh and bones and their own handful of dreams. It all seems so simple, so searingly true, and I wonder what sort of blanket I was sitting under my entire life.

With the awareness of adulthood, I’ve become achingly aware—of my capacity to inflict pain, and the ceaseless possibility of being hurt by others.

All at once, I see the universe of ways I can flourish, create, and make life beautiful. My choices are no longer weightless. My place in the greater story of things is real, and worth taking seriously.

When we were kids, we dreamt all the time about who we wanted to be. We weren’t scared to face the immensity of our potential.

So now that we’ve reached the stream—now that we’ve run and stumbled and seen the full face of life—let’s not forget the task at hand.

The only way to answer that ultimate question, of who you are, of who you want to become, is to paint it through your life.

I don’t believe we came all this way just to grow up. Adulthood must merely be the opening bell. Now that we’ve read the rules, life is finally asking us to stand for something.

Somewhere in my heart, I’ve come to terms with my potential—for joy, for pain, for the countless emotions that make life real. And I see that there is nowhere for my dreams to flow except into my life. I must become the instrument to express my own convictions.

It‘s the one thing in the world only I can do, and by far the most precious.

I don’t claim to know more, just more than myself since last sunset. We’re all left to change, to ripen and bloom with the passing days, as the sky fades to white, and the old clouds faintly steal the air of other days.

In the meantime, all we can do—all we could ever do—has never changed. Inhale, exhale, and hold life carefully as it spins from this day, to the next, to the next…and perhaps somewhere beyond.

Let’s turn our time into something beautiful

-Aaryan