Are You Rushing Your life?
When you think about where you are in your life right now, can you say you chose it or did someone else? Did someone else influence your decisions? Did you ever feel like you had to rush your life because you were closer to thirty than twenty? Did you ever feel like your life was not matching society’s expectations?
I ponder this thought myself as I approach my 28th birthday. I compared where I am in life against where the average twenty-eight-year-old might be or even where the average twenty-eight-year-old, supposedly, should be.
Eighteen-year-old me imagined twenty-eight year old me to be engaged or even married, to be thinking about starting a family or buying a home, to have been settled in my work life, to know what I want and where I am going, to have a five-year plan, to have a dog, to be a real adult. None of this has happened and truthfully, the majority of this list is not of the slightest interest to me. Except getting a dog and eventually becoming the textbook definition of an adult of course.
The mirror and stairs are constant reminders that we are ageing, family will bring up your perpetual single status at family gatherings, social media will make you feel like you are wasting your young years and, of course, there is the constant reminder that life is short and finite. And so it begins, the mental life checklist, the rush, born from our fear of getting older.
Once we hit twenty, we are against the clock. This idea that between the ages of 20 and 29, we can live our lives, be young, wild and free and then once the clock strikes midnight and we hit 30, then it is time to settle down in all aspects of life, to have your self together, to be grown up. That life needs to be “done” by 30.
But why are we rushing? Why have we convinced ourselves that in order to be adulting the right way, everything needs to be done before thirty? Thirty is still young. Lest we forget that our brains are not even fully developed until twenty-five.
After much rumination and journaling, I came to an epiphany that isn’t all that profound but one that I needed. A reminder that the focus should be on where I am and not where I should be. There is nowhere you should be but right here where you are. We all traverse through life our own way, there is not one set path.
When we rush to catch up with everyone else, we don’t necessarily make the best decisions and then in hindsight, we wonder why we didn’t just slow down and think about what we were doing because we had the time.
Make sure you are choosing and living your life for yourself and not choosing it to please others or to fit a mould for the perfect insert-age-here. How you are perceived for your decisions should not be a concern, you know what’s good for you, so do you. If you can.
It may be cliché, but most of my twenties were spent trying to “find myself”. To know what I wanted, what my values and beliefs were, where I felt most happy and comfortable, what kind of people I wanted to spend my time with, taking chances, making mistakes, failing and just figuring out myself.
The beauty of being young and in your twenties is how selfish you can be and how much time you have alone. You won’t always have that time alone, cherish it.
In a long-winded manner, what I really am trying to say is, it’s okay if you haven’t got it all figured out. The truth is that no one really does, but we have time to figure it out, we don’t need to rush.
