On Turning 30

"All models are wrong, but some are useful," was the famous bromide of George E.P. Box that my statistics professor put up on a slide.

Turning 30 is just a date.  Just another birthday.  I know that.

And yet, this particular round number has been a useful model to think back on where I've been, and think forward to where I'm headed.  Maybe turning 30 is just a psychological juncture, but it's a juncture nonetheless.

First of all, it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.

Perhaps because my itinerary for the big three-oh didn't give me a chance to think much: awake at 2:50, 6:00 flight from Chicago, 10:00 interview in Boston's Chinatown for an hour-and-a-half, 20-minute lunch, 2:00 interview near Government Center for another two-and-a-half-hours, 30-minute call about a job, 5 minutes sprinting through the rain.  Home by 6.  You could have stuck a fork in me.

It was finally at the bar that it sunk in.

It hasn't been as hard as I might have thought because I don't feel a day over 25.  All the years people have been telling me I look young.  When I was a sophomore in college I was mistaken for a sophomore in high school by the town librarian.  That's been the pattern ever since.  What once felt like an albatross--being baby-faced--now feels like a badge of honor.  There are plenty of folks who look 40 at 30; if I come off as younger, then either I've got lucky genes, or else the exercise and good eating are paying off.

Turning 30 has made me think about 20, and all the things that have changed since then.

When I turned 20, I was drifting through college, unsure where I was headed, with few buoys of support.  I hadn't yet made a truly close, enduring college friend.

I thought I was done studying Spanish--only to be headed to Chile 13 months later for a life-changing year.

I had never biked more than 10 miles--several years later I would huff and puff my way to my first metric century.

Above all, It's striking how little I knew, relatively.  How to write, how to write poetry, how to write pragmatically for a job, how to write about numbers.  My yoga instructor talks about how he'd trade his late-thirties body for his twenty-year-old body any day--but not the mind.  I couldn't agree more.

At the same time, I'm struck by how the core things that make me happy have fundamentally not changed.  Losing myself in an hour of pickup basketball, writing in any form, sitting outside in the sun on a summer day, breaking bread or sharing a beer with a close friend.  Those things sustained me at 20, and they sustain me all the same today.  I only hope they can keep on sustaining me over the next 10 years.