driving faster in my car, falling further from just what we are

i shall begin with a simple fact: i am now 22 years old. i shall then proceed to rehash a point that some of you might have known me to make: in life, we seek out poignancy. we make milestones out of things that are patently unremarkable. the passing of years, as the most convenient and comprehensible unit of time, is one of those things we place particular significance on. so we come together and celebrate a communal passage of time each new year's day, and we mark the passage of our own years on our birthdays. 25th of november is mine. it makes absolutely no difference to you, and if i were to be totally rational about it, it should make absolutely no difference to me. but, as a socialized human being, it does. and so here i am, marking it.

those of you who know me well would know that my past year was difficult. i went through some of the most trying periods of my life thus far, and while i am afraid to admit it, i reached my breaking point on more than one occasion. so much of what i have gone through has felt like a futile grasping at straws, and even now, as i emerge from this unpleasant period, so much seem to lie in pieces that i can't put back together again

the broad conclusion i have is that life isn't a trajectory. we age, but that's pretty much the only consistent change we'll see. anyone who believes that things can only get better is clearly too optimistic, but anyone who can only see things going downhill is equally mistaken. at best we see patterns emerge, and hope that they don't destroy us. at worst, we go through life as a mess. there's so much emphasis on the belief that life has to mean something, when it's quite obvious that it does not.

nihilism is not a particularly life-affirming notion, which makes it somewhat inappropriate for a birthday. however, this is the kind of roundabout argument that i'm prone to making. to me, the notion that life doesn't mean anything is perhaps a greater affirmation of life than any preconcieved notion of existence. life is not an ordered construction; it is not a path towards a goal. we can choose to seek happiness today, tomorrow, a week later, a decade down the road, or not at all. we can live a life of virtue (who defined that anyway?), or indulge in sheer hedonism. we can be innovators or experts, or just escapists and dilettantes. we make our own choices and live by them, and that is all.

i'm not saying things are easy. we are all constrained by the things we have and the things we are able to do. most importantly, our choices come up against those of others, and we negotiate our way around them. and at the end of the day, hopefully we've done the best we can. it's so easy to judge, so easy to rail at the apparently injustice of a given outcome; i've done my share of such things. we all want what we want, but so much of being a better person is simply understanding that we can never have everything, but that it isn't the end of the world because who says we need to have everything anyway? all of this comes from within us, and when we start to moderate our expectations, when we start looking at life not as some kind of game to be won, but as something we have been given to make use of, then the pressure isn't to get everything, but to figure out a coherent picture of what we want to do with our lives.

i'm starting to drift into self-help book territory, and goodness knows i'm in no place to preach. perhaps what i want to say is, in some ways i've become a happier person that i've ever been, and it took being more miserable than ever to get there. looking beyond the apparent irony of that, it is also obvious why that might be the case. if my 21st birthday has been filled with a heady sense of possibility, of wanting to have everything, then my 22nd birthday is a much muted affair.

but most importantly, i feel that in some ways we all get there. if we take away the goal of life, what we have left is merely a process, and that's something we can all do. i'm struck by the profound sense that everything is just the way that it's supposed to be. i can do so much thinking about how my life might have been different had i chosen differently, but i'm also convinced of the futility of that exercise.

in the end, we keep on moving. i'm lucky enough to be where i am, with many wonderful people who i know care for me greatly. seeing as my birthday falls so close to thanksgiving, it's only right that i thank you all for being here, in one way or another.