You'll Love Being Thirty!

Hey Vitamin Z fans. I’m filling in today and tomorrow while Zach is out. I am part of The Vine and Z's my homeboy. This coincides with me being one of the official bloggers for the Willow Creek Association's Global Leadership Summit. You can normally keep up with me at Executing Ideas and on Twitter. Here's a fun piece that Relevant used a little over a year ago:

“Thirties are great!” Kris half-shouted over the clamor of the three little kids running around our restaurant table, banging spoons and sippy cups against tables and heads. We were gathered to celebrate one of our members pioneering the crossing into his thirties, the first from the group besides 50-something Kris.

Due to the din, I wasn’t sure that I had heard her correctly. “What did you just say?” I grimaced at her.

“You’re all going to love being thirty. The whole decade of your thirties is fabulous!” Despite being well shy of the normal age for dementia, I thought Kris must be losing it.

The food arrived and the little ones gave us a few minutes of quiet while they smeared pizza in every direction, sometimes even mouths. I listened carefully while Kris further explained her outlandish statement. Later, I mulled over this strange teaching from my wise elder. My brow remained furrowed, but I vowed to investigate once I turned thirty in two years time.

I am now approaching 32. And I love my thirties, and you can, too. Here’s why…

You’re an adult.

Thirty-two is two times 16, which is when I thought I became an adult. I considered my adulthood as starting at that tender age because I could then hurtle along at outrageous speeds at all hours of the day or night in a metal box with rubber wheels, potentially able to kill any number of people in my path. That, if nothing else, is not a responsibility to entrust to a child.

Then when I was 18, I received legal permission to go off and die defending my country (though I didn’t). That conferred a certain adult-like status. And I moved out of my folks’ home permanently just before I turned 19, another landmark. There was a beer on my 21^st, and marriage a few months later. Surely these marked the actual passage into adulthood. Then a little creature named Phoebe entered the world when I was 25, and I became Daddy, the final landmark of manhood. With a bit of help from my wife, I could actually make people. That must mean I am an adult.

However, an uneasiness accompanied all these steps, stages, and birthdays. I didn’t quite feel like an adult, and other adults didn’t seem to really regard me as one. From my peers to my parents’ baby boom generation, no one really regarded me as a grown-up. Sure, everyone would say that they did, but not much was expected from me in any sphere. I still hovered awkwardly in family gatherings, sat lowest in the pecking order at work, and in church I wasn’t about to lead anything except youth or young adult ministries. Everywhere I went, I felt the unspoken message, “You’re an adult (but not really).”

Upon entering my 30s, though, something shifted in how people saw me. Probably I was standing taller—my shoulders finally broadened from my scrawny wedding picture. But I also had more than just a couple months or a year of experience in a few things. People actually consulted me on important questions. I started to feel not just grown-up but downright presidential!

Lose the Angst.

It’s no secret that from puberty, most people enter a decade-long search for who they are, why they’re here, and where they’re going, at least in the dominant North American culture. Our heads spin, and no wonder: the world is your oyster, the sky’s the limit, you can do anything you want, see it and be it, dream big, shoot for the moon.

This wide-open smorgasbord of opportunities and the ability to visualize doing anything anywhere in the world, plus the pressure of finding a mate and a source of income, leads us to a state of mental anguish. What if we choose wrongly? What if we fail? What if we change our minds? We carry the angst of having to move quickly and enjoy everything, or else the train of happy living might pass us by.

To some extent, the questions and concerns are valid. The choices and advances we make in our twenties can take us in radically different directions for the rest of our lives. Taking it too far, though, we let the pressure crush us, leading to unhelpful stress or paralysis. For me, this angst led me to move 35 times while in my twenties, with 12 different jobs, including part-time gigs. I can partly attribute these moves to an honest desire to do whatever work God had for me anywhere in the world. But I also know now that a share of my choices followed my own psychological need to find the “best,” the “right.”

Entering my thirties, this pressure is off. Like Popeye, there’s a sense of “I yam what I yam.” Yes, I’m still pushing in new directions, trying to achieve more, considering new work and places. There’s not the same force behind it, though. I’m comfortable knowing I will get where I’m going eventually. The angst has evaporated.

Nothing to Prove.

In my twenties, as I sensed nobody really regarded me as an adult, I tried to show that I was, in fact, grown up. I wanted to do what was necessary to get “promoted” from the kids’ table. This was not a conscious effort, but my behaviors and choices were made trying to be mature, to be wise, to satisfy all those peers and baby boomers who did not seem to truly see me as an adult.

During my twenties I met weekly with a group of Christians raging in age from 21 to 72. I remember thinking the group must be grateful to have a few of us young ones adding pep to the geriatrics. I look back now and see that we gained at least as much from them, of course, and probably much more. They also had to forgive plenty of our own twenty-something quirks. We thought we knew much more than we actually did. We loved to contribute the latest thing we were learning as if no one had ever learned that lesson in the history of the world. We regularly brought seemingly-urgent prayers for the next major life decision. We were attempting to reduce our metaphysical angst by showing we really could shoot for the moon, all the while fearing that we might screw up and blow it to smithereens.

Now, however, I am 32 and things have changed. I have made my share of mistakes, but life goes on. I have a wonderful, intelligent, beautiful wife. We have two fantastic, smart, cute little kids. My professional life is a joy, flexible and split between training African church leaders and writing and photography projects. I do not need to prove to anyone else that I am an adult because I feel like (and believe) I actually am one.

We tend to think of aging as a downward spiral. From about 25 years onward, aging equals deterioration. We expect to say goodbye to laughing regularly, pulling all-nighters, dating without the ever-looming word “marriage,” and playing pick-up basketball without inflicting lasting damage to joints and ligaments. Meanwhile we say hello to wrinkles, forgetfulness, high insurance premiums, and a peer group that goes to bed at 9 pm and barely keeps up with the fashions of the 1990s. “Sure, thirties are great,” our culture says. “That’s because from there on, it’s just a short road to the nursing home.”

In my conversation with Kris, though, she didn’t just glow about 30s. She had something positive to say about every decade she had lived—exploring your identity in your 20s, finding footholds in your 30s, and believe it or not, she said that our 40s and 50s will be all right, too. I see her and others her friends her age gracefully tackling life changes like becoming a regional director of an organization or helping their children select a college, and I suspect she’s right. I even know some seventy-year-olds who make me look forward to that decade—I can’t wait to sit in my armchair occasionally looking out at my birdfeeder and tell my twenty-five-year-old friends to stop stressing about everything.

But for now, ol’ Kris was right—I love my thirties.

Anybody else love the thirties?