Birthday thoughts

Today is my 28th birthday. It feels so surreal to say that — 28th — since I still feel like a little kid at heart. That’s what getting older is all about anyway — remaining young at heart and never losing that wide-eyed curiosity of our childhood. It brings to mind a quote I love from author and musician Nick Cave in his response to a 13-year-old’s question about how to live a full, creative, actualized, spiritually rich life in a world ridden with so much hate and disconnect (and summarized beautifully by Maria Popova), in which he recommends to “be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can … a little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world.” Truly what I aspire to be every year of my life.

This past year was a banner year for me — I got married, visited Mexico for the first time, moved to San Jose, made new friends, read a lot of great books (recap post to come next month), and started this website, the idea of which I’ve been ruminating on for quite some time now. It’s not perfect by any means, but I’m proud of my progress.

In many ways, my birthday feels like New Year’s Eve, a day to reflect on the past year of my life — at the triumphs and stumblings, the absolutely wonderful days and the really hard ones — and to look forward to the year ahead. Who will I be this time next year? What lessons will I have learned? What great and terrible moments lie ahead that I cannot even imagine yet (The Fault in our Stars, anyone?). I’m already imagining how fun it’ll be to re-read this next year on November 2 and to see how much has changed since. But I’ll leave that as memories in future tense for now.

For now, I keep returning to the quote on my favorite bookmark, a thought and aspiration that I know will stick with me throughout this next year of my life — in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in his all-time classic The Little Prince, “I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.”