I woke up this morning with a simple but categorical conclusion:
Nothing’s changed.
I was 29 yesterday, and I’m 30 today, but, well…
Nothing’s changed.
I used to believe in decisive moments, in dramatic decisions and bold resolutions that mark the divergence of a life from its previous course.
I don’t believe in those things, anymore.
Life has taught me a different lesson: change is gradual, slow, ponderous. We may exist in the microseconds of the now, but we change in the eons of the geological, the tectonic, the universal.
I am different than I was a year ago, very different than I was ten years ago, and unrecognizably different from my five-year-old self. But I am, within the margin of error, the same person that I was yesterday.
Which means that all change - every lesson learned and moment of growth - occurs within the margin of error. Imperceptible amongst the noise of daily living, only visible as a pattern in the hindsight of memory.
I can look back and compare, forge a Venn diagram of my current and past selves, to see what’s new and what’s not. But memory is ever a changing palace, rebuilt each time one visits it - was I always temperate, or did that come with age? Did I learn how to manage my emotions recently, or is it a skill I’ve been struggling towards since adolescence?
To mark a moment of time is to look at the past and the future. At twenty, I knew nothing of thirty. At thirty, I know nothing of forty. The next ten years seem to me as unknowable as the previous ten, with a single caveat: I face them with an additional decade of life experience.
I have, as everyone does, traded youth for experience, and I don’t know if the exchange was worth it: only that it was involuntary. The past is now set in stone, unchangeable. Three decades of my life fixed forever in time like an insect in amber, to be witnessed but never altered, studied but never changed, learned from but never fixed.
So I am different today than I was yesterday, by some small unnoticeable amount, and I will be different tomorrow too. Age is a continuous process, for all that we mark it in discrete intervals, for all that we put milestones along the road and count them as they pass.
Today I’m older than I was yesterday, and tomorrow I will be too. But today I’m 30 and yesterday I was 29, and that will never happen again.
Here’s to another day for all of us, another sunrise and sunset, another small change and another moment turned from potential into past. Here’s to getting older, which for all its issues is better than the alternative. Here’s to a milestone passing by, to a moment that will never come again, to looking back and looking forward.
Here’s to 30.