Self-Appreciation...or Egotism, Refined

I will be turning 30 in a few short days.

30 years alive. Now that’s something to celebrate.

A lot of people I know who have already passed this milestone – many of them women – bemoan the passing of time, the waning of youth, the inevitable creep of old age. How terribly pessimistic. I consider myself lucky to have never succumbed to the aging trap: the belief that with each passing year, a little more of the self withers and dies. I admit, most of the time I can’t even remember how old I am, but the landmark 30th birthday is, I’m quite certain, the next one.

I adore my birthday. Perhaps this is childish or egotistical, but I cannot deny the impish pleasure I find in having a day just to celebrate my own life. I’ve been looking forward to this one since January. Thirty years walking the face of the earth: that’s a pretty amazing concept when you look at it objectively. When someone gets sentenced to thirty years in jail, we think, “Wow. That’s a long time.” But somehow our own life seems to move so much more quickly. That same 30 years has passed in an instant. And we grapple with ways to slow it down, to actually allow ourselves to absorb what’s passing before our eyes, to somehow avoid that inevitable feeling that everything has amounted to nothing more than one, ill-defined blur. In the unavoidable games of irony, of course, all of that effort to slow down so often makes life more hectic, more stressful…and even more of a blurred landscape.

Lost in that blurred landscape, unfortunately, is the potential to reflect on what an accomplishment life really is: the struggles you may have faced, the sadness, the defeat, the joy, the love and loss. Compounded by the (undeserved) negative connotation that aging bears, the gift of being alive lies neglected, an unwanted present among the trappings.

I suppose you could call it an epiphany of sorts, but as I was considering the impending birthday, I felt a sudden sense of self-contentment. My mind wasn’t on overdrive contemplating the physical flaws, the too-slow running pace, the inability to become a writer. I looked and saw, rather, a muscular body, a runner, a writer. Each within my own terms, my own definition. I felt an appreciation for myself, for my life, an acceptance of who I was. I realized, then, that spending the energy on trying to “fix” my life – slow it down, make it better – was blinding me to the very fact of my life. It was (is) a refined egotism: I am content with all that I am. And it took me nearly 30 years to be so.

Most startling in this entire moment was the force with which my marriage suddenly struck me, how sharply it came into view. Over the past five years, my landscape has been blurred with his, both of us in love with each other but not really differentiating or elevating that love beyond all of the other chaotic elements of our life together. But now it stood before me clearly, paramount to anything else. How could anything else have ever mattered when I have the love of the most amazing man in the world?
It was that thought, I think, that truly gave birth to my sense of refined egotism. He loves me. And if he sees something in me worthy of his love and his promise of a life together, then surely it must be there. And surely I can love myself for the same reason.

Both feelings – of the power of my marriage and of my newly-defined self-appreciation – are intoxicating. I smile more. I look forward to my runs. The gym is a pleasure. Even work is exponentially more tolerable. There is a happiness so profound that it colors every minute of my day; the sheer joy of being comfortable in one’s own skin is indescribable.

Life – at any age – is such an opportunity to grow, to be introspective, to wonder at the person you were and are and can be. At nearly 30 years of age, I know that, as long as I never lose sight of that, I will never feel old. I am just starting a new life, one unencumbered by self-loathing or wasted energy, one marked by an appreciation of myself and my marriage so sincere I feel it in every fiber of my being. I know that each year my age will steadily tick up, but by relishing in my life, my spirit will persist, ageless.

I wonder what I would be thinking right now if I ignored that gift of being alive, if I continued to be caught up in the blurred landscape. If, instead of using my milestone birthday to reflect, I chose to wage a battle against my age. If I continued to be blind to the limitless possibilities that the next 30 years could hold.

Perhaps I would just feel old.

Copyright © 2008

Cursing & The Soul

I decided, this past Friday, to stop cursing.

Let me note that I am passionate about my curse words: the freedom to accentuate an otherwise hum-drum sentiment with a well placed “shit” or “hell” was one I held dear. Mere anger can explode with power when laced with a few “assholes”, and excitement just seems more vibrant when colored with a lively “fucking” or two. There’s fire in cursing, a command for attention and a statement of precisely how serious you are.

And on Friday I extinguished that fire…or, at least, smothered it slightly and stomped on it half-heartedly; it’s hard to banish such a well-loved semantic tool, no?

The decision stems from a broader, much more far-reaching realization that so much of what I do – even seemingly mundane daily habits – is slowly poisoning my soul. This is not a religious awakening; I reference “soul” with a much more general intention. Remove the artificial, the superficial, the minutia and everything we so often to fail to recognize as unimportant. What remains – that concentrated core of humanity residing in each of us – is soul. It transcends religion. It is spirituality in its most organic form. And it’s being poisoned.

It seems a far leap from colorful cursing to poisonous soul. I am coming to realize, though, that with each utterance I both robbed myself of both my ability to weave language in masterful ways (or at least as masterful as I can be) and relegated the true passions of my soul to some quiet corner, where no voice is given them. The English language is blessed with a ripe and robust vocabulary; surely I, a graduate in the study of the language, could capitalize on it without resorting to the tired and uncreative realm of curses. Likewise, wasn’t I confining my communications to the arguably limited world of the simplistic “shit” “damn” and “fuck”? Isn’t what I held inside myself so much more ponderous, so much more worthy of discussion? Yet I ignored this, choosing, even enjoying, to operate within the safe realm of the common, the acceptable, the simple.

You see, this realization is two fold: most noticeable is the deterioration in my communication skills and the surrendering of any command of the English language. But beyond that, and more importantly, is that there is a soul within me – there is something within me that is deep, significant, passionate…and ignored for far too long. Painting simplistic language with curse words rather than exerting the effort to deepen the language is merely symptomatic of a systematic failure to acknowledge the soul. It’s easier to curse than carefully select meaningful words. And it’s easier to coast through life worrying about money and clothes and American Idol rather than find and nourish the truly significant.

Lost in all of that coasting is the soul, that core that makes me human, gives me dimension. It’s poisoned by my ignorance of it. Caught up in everything that society tells us matters – the corporate success, the bank account, the luxury car, the expensive school, the luxury vacations – I am finding myself feeling anything but fulfilled. On the contrary, there’s an unsettling feeling of emptiness, a growing wariness that maybe society has it wrong, maybe we’ve all been chasing an illusion of happiness, an imagined oasis in what we’ve contrived to be a barren world.

I’ve never felt this before: life has never been barren or empty for me. And it cannot be a coincidence that only after chasing an imagined happiness did the world seem devoid of passion and joy. Only after I dismissed the soul as too weighty, its passions too much work. Only after I embraced the easy path of superficiality. Only after I learned how to curse and forgot how to talk.

There is a soul within me. There is power within me – beyond the power of a well-placed curse word or of a corporate title. There is reward in the work of cultivating that power, be it the perfectly-crafted sentence or the deep, transcending feeling of true happiness. There is a cathartic joy in deciding not to curse anymore.

Copyright © 2008