views from the third floor

There’s something about multiples of 10. Maybe it’s the roundness of numbers that lends them an air of definitiveness. A completion. For some people turning 30 is like swallowing a bitter truth - adulthood has grabbed you by the nape of your neck and is here to inform you that any claims to youthful bliss that you priorly observed has squarely reached its expiration. Apparently, it’s all down-hill from here. But you don’t look or feel much different to how you did 24hours ago, it’s just an arbitrary number after all. So you get over it and somehow determine - maybe reminded by a wise soul further up the queue - that the following decade is when you actually start getting old, and an existential crisis is temporarily deferred.

Dramatics aside, I’ve been fairly ambivalent to birthdays for a while now. It’s been neither a marked cause for celebration or a time to mourn my slow bodily decay. I’ve seen both sides. I have a long-time friend who has actively avoided mentioning his birthday since childhood, and a wife who coerced me, despite my initial bewilderment, into acknowledging "half-birthdays" as noteworthy events. I could claim that I have the more balanced approach but the margin in sentiment between my boy and I are probably slimmer than I dare to admit.

Being born in mid-December means that the last two weeks of each year is a reflective time-warp. It’s like being placed in Kami’s hyperbolic time chamber for introspection, during which the annual marker of my cumulative wear and tear coincides with the beckoning of the new year. 2022 was that much more intense as I too graduated into my third decade.

tries and trials

My 20s were a mixed bag of tries and trials: trying things, and trials from life. I suspect my 30s will be much the same. Dark and light periods bleed into each other: breakups and breakthroughs, ventures started and ended, friendships nurtured and culled, spiritual highs and lows, health disorders, marriage and fatherhood.

Looking back at some of those years is like tracing events the morning after blacking out. I recall some moments hazily, but the gaps remain too prominent to piece together a coherent picture, or strangely, even identify with the person that I was. Sitting in this café at my laptop, a gulf of circumstance separating me from my “past self”, it is dawning on me that I’m better positioned, in this instance, to reflect forward.

resolutions

I tweeted my ‘forever resolution’ on 1st January, not to be contrarian among the mass of more conventional New year-New me aspirations shared online, but because I’m not particularly inspired by the time constrained, productivity-orientated approach to goal setting that both corporate and personal development culture promotes. For a time I did find it compelling, in a way that any recovering perfectionist might; expecting a sense of fulfilment from squeezing output out of every waking minute of the day. Or more commonly, being guilty when apparently failing to.

Sure, productivity is important, but choosing metrics of self-value that are derived from economic thinking feels reductive to the point of dehumanising, and therefore at odds with what I most earnestly desire to connect with today: my innate humanity.

The truth is, at 30 I wonder how much of my life I've deeply experienced, and how much I've been present for only in gross appearance; deaf, blind and dumb to its beautiful intricacies.

With that in mind, what if I decided my resolutions based on how I want to be in the world, rather than what I want to achieve within a year, and let that be my guide?

Here is what I landed on:

1. Softer Heart - sensitive, self-aware and compassionate
2. Harder Skills - deep competency and knowledge in skills that are valuable to myself, my community, and society at large
3. Truest self - embracing my most authentic self by being honest and unrepressed in my expression, giving permission for others to be the same

unSMART

Clearly, this won’t neatly translate into a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) goals framework, but there are a few reasons why the above feels like a more sound approach for me:

1. I’m value-driven but method agnostic. I’ve found that having firm principles but flexible means is a better foundation for orientation than specific goals, particularly as a generalist with broad interests. The granular details of outcome is less important than how and why I do them. This might not be the case for someone with a more vocational lean or specialised expertise but is certainly the case for me
2. The natural end-point of all my goals is death. I have no idea when this will occur. I'm young enough to feel deluded about its inevitably but have had enough hospital visits to have entertained its imminence. It stands to reason that any resolution should be as meaningful to me now as it would be for me at any point in my hypothetical future. They need to be timeless, hence ‘forever’
3. Character affects how you navigate everything in life. Working towards a clear ideal of your values and principles is a more comprehensive approach than setting goals in compartmentalised areas. Afterall, “how you do one thing is how you do everything”.
4. I’m done with perfectionism, but not excellence. I went through my academic life aiming for and mostly succeeding at achieving top grades and I don’t think it instilled a healthy concept of what success is. The appeal of a high score, £ amount or any other quantitative measure pales in comparison to the value of transformation through diligent effort. That is my North star

So against the advice of most self-help gurus, my forever resolutions are lofty, ambiguous and probably too ethereal in the present to be tangibly measured against at a later date. How do you measure the softness of one’s heart or their authenticity? There’s no obvious metric and even thinking of abstracting some out inspires that sickly, turn-me-into-a-data-point feeling of human degradation that productivity-obsession creates. Maybe that's the romantic in me valuing the subjective. I suppose connection with God, quality of relationships, appreciation of beauty, vitality, fulfilment in my work and mental balance will have to suffice.