At 3:50 a.m today I turned a year older.
Here's I think what twenty-one feels like. Twenty-one is still young.. twenty-one is still figuring out what to do after college.. twenty-one is ambivalent.. so ambivalent in fact.. twenty-one is a bit scared of the things ahead…. but twenty-one has no choice other than facing ‘ahead’ with whatever twenty-one has at the moment... twenty-one is a lot wiser than twenty and wise enough to know that it’ll get a lot wiser if it only let the years unfold itself.
There's something that happens between early childhood and early adulthood where we make all sorts of assumptions about ourselves and the world around us. We formulate this plan on what and on how we'll spend our grown up years. I always knew God was looking over my shoulder, watching me scribble down my plans, smiling because He already knew the outcome. And lately I realized that it was ok if He scratched off some of my plans and added His own. Because his plans have always been so much better, even if I didn't think so at the time.
As I'm typing this I can’t help but think about how this year went by, how it molded me into whatever kind of young adult I am today. So below I enumerated some of the important lessons my 21st year of existence taught me.
1. the whole missing going to school drama after graduating is heck true.
2. ‘forever’ comes with a warranty.. and that depends individually.
3. no matter how old you are, when your mom says ‘it’s gonna be alright’ you'll still genuinely believe that it’s gonna be.
4. that thing you put in your bag before leaving the house and then decided you wouldn't need it so you put it back at the last minute? more often you'll end up needing them.
5. the law of attraction works.
6. when you decide to test some other person's loyalty, you’ll end up proving your own.
7. the front row is the best learning spot.
8. drinking 8-12 glasses of water a day is not an easy job as it looks.
9. when you really want to wake up on your alarm, place it 2 meters away from your bed.
10. my brain can only tolerate a certain amount of math, and there’s no cure to that.
11. to never second-guess my intuition.
12. the fine line between tolerance and acceptance is quality.
13. next to God, the best source of inspiration is the person I see in the mirror everyday.
14. Stacie Orrico was right.. there's definitely more to life than chasing down every temporary high.
15. life begins at the end of our comfort zones.
16. one conscious deep breath a day is good for the soul.
17. putting my feet up the chair and slapping my hand in front of my face lessens the trauma a horror movie does to me.
18. coffee taste better with Zee Avi on the playlist.
19. moisturizer is a physiologic need.
20. if you say something nice, you’ll hear something nice in return.
21. everything will fall into its right places, you just need to take one step at a time.
Today, I wish for peace, for myself and for those around me. I think that only good things happen when we have peace. I also came to realize that chasing new experiences makes life so much richer. It may not provide us with a comfortable path at all times, we may not exactly know what the end result will look like, but one thing is for sure, it's going to be worth it, it has to..because life is not stagnant, it's constantly flowing and we're going to be happiest when we can be flexible enough to adapt with it.
Every year brings another phase of change and even though my initial reaction is to run and hide and start over, I’m working on cultivating growth with boundaries. I learned that I don’t need to start over completely to begin again. I can use what I have at the moment and build on it. I can take a deep breath and keep on trying because life isn’t going to take a pause just because I'm not yet prepared for it. So here goes nothing. I’ll continue to compose the here and now and while I don’t know where that will take me, that’s okay. Because the beauty of being 21 is: I don’t have to know.
