Dear Millenials Near Thirty- A Love Letter

 

 

Dear Millenials Near Thirty,

I know you've thought about that number.

You can admit it. You may have tried forgetting it... Nevertheless, it's there on the horizon.

 

And I want to tell you wherever you are, it's fine. That's the message I wanted to tell those of you who share my stage of life: in the latter days of their twenties with thirty on the horizon.

Turning twenty six two years ago increased my awareness of my age. Turning twenty seven has made that awareness ever more acute. Like most of you, I've dwelt more on this fact more often than I should have. I've looked over my life since college and made the mistake of comparing it to others. I wonder about different paths, different roads and I try and decipher the pictures on social media to see if friends from high-school or college are more or less content with themselves than I am.

I know you've done this too. We know we shouldn't make these comparisons. But we do. We're human and we have windows into the lives of others as no generation has had before.

In the end though, social media is just that a window. The realm of the internet is a trailer of a person's movie not the biopic of their entire life.

Since coming back to the States in  February I've been able to catch up with a number of my peers. Without the pressures of full time teaching I can finally make space to truly reconnect with all the people I'd lost touch with during my two years in Thailand. Whether over Skype or in the flesh the stories I've been told by friends have been as diverse as they have been insightful.

Some people have moved from one country to another, some have changed cities, some have started new careers or gone back to school, some have made a rapid ascent up the ladder.

Many have gotten married, some have gotten divorced, some have ended long relationships, some have moved back in with their parents, others have moved out.

And for some their world has not changed significantly at all. They remain in the same place they were two years ago, working the same job, living in the same house, together with the same person.

All these changes have been fascinating to learn about. Each life is so different and yet the one thing that holds us all together is that no one really feels like they have figured everything out. There's still, for most people I've talked to, a sense of uncertainty about their journey. For all the empty spaces we've filled in our lives, there remain vacancies. Some old some new.

A successful job but no relationship, a profession which brings money and prestige but no personal satisfaction, a fulfilling profession that doesn't pay quite enough to support a family.

We are fuller people. Yet we are also more aware than ever of the empty places in ourselves.

Yet, it's all alright. I'm here to write you that it's okay. I believe one day many of those holes will be filled and the few that remain will be become treasures to us.

Because the older we get the more comfortable we become with the weaknesses we have and prouder of the strengths we possess. I find myself loving the holes and vacancies in my life with new appreciation. We may never be full but that does not mean we are empty. It doesn't mean we can't live a life of meaning, purpose and contentment.

You are not alone in your uncertainty and ambiguity. That is what this decade is all about. :)

Much Love Fellow Almost Thirtysomethings,

Sean

Hospitalization- Waiting in the Void

It was one Monday ago; my second week in Kansas and my third week in the US.

In the living room, I was standing across from my father who was sprawled out on a blue recliner. Five men were buzzing around him. Paramedics and EMTs in blue sweatshirts and sheriff's deputy in brown watching them. They were attaching cords to my dad's chest, reading indecipherable lines on strips of red paper rolling out of little machines in duffel bags.

 I stood in my black jacket alongside one of my sisters (home from college for Spring Break) as my mother calmly searched her laptop for information on their insurance plan. I listened as my father talked to these men, who had swept into our home in a tide of sirens and flashing lights. He told them what he had told us a half hour or so earlier. There was pain radiating from the center of his torso. He was sweating and disoriented.

Was it a heart attack? We didn't think so. Nevertheless it was serious. My mother sister and I had could see that and the men we called confirmed it.

A stretcher was wheeled in through the front door and the men helped my father walk the two or three steps he needed to take to get into the recliner.  

 It was then that I put words to a new feeling rising inside me: "When you called 911, you gave him to them."  

 My family was "Putting his life into someone else's hands." When I thought of this phrase before, I had always pictured the situation it described from the perspective of the person who's well being was in danger. Yet as my mother left with the ambulance and my sister and I stayed behind, I experienced these words from the side of one invested in that ambiguous life but unable to influence the next stage.

I was in a void, a void of inaction and uncertainty. Each new bit of information my mother texted us from the ER unveiled a little more about my father's condition. Every time something new was revealed, we would go instantly to Web MD or one of the other medical sites to fill in any remaining gaps.

As the night passed the culprit was revealed; pancreatitis. Some time after that my sister and I made the trip to the hospital and saw our father off to his room. We drove home with our mother, leaving our dad to the care of his nurses and their morphine.We were a little more knowledgeable of the circumstances we found ourselves in. Yet still, over the next few days we continued waiting in the void. This was all we could do. Yet there were times when that was the last thing I wanted to do.

We people, and perhaps we Westerners above all others, spend much of our lives trying to control and shape our destinies. We believe we should be able to control everything about our lives. We try our hardest to boil the madness and ambiguity of life into simple full proof formulas that will enable us to achieve all we want and avoid any pitfalls.

In truth, we control o so very little of what happens to us. Uncertainty and change are the monarchs of our existence not rebellious elements within it. 

Yet we can look Uncertainty in the face and smile without giving into Fatalism. Humankind has a remarkable ability to bounce back. The days passed the men and women we had trusted in were able to make my father's inflamed pancreas settle. Chances are he will be home today or tomorrow thanks to their tireless work.

He will have to have other procedures after this. Nevertheless, the worst is over and the void, which I've grown accustomed to, is receding. And there will be many laughs and times of joy ahead for my family in this, our world of Ambiguity.