coming full circle

Just remember, once you're over the hill 

you begin to pick up speed.

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Charles Schulz

People generally dread turning 30, like an affliction that creeps in in the dead of night, turning youth into vain memory, a faint spark of glory days when life meant frolicking in wanton abandon, unbridled by mature conceptions such as responsibility and making a living. Considered a social fulcrum, men of this age and beyond are expected to forego juvenile dreams, and fickle behaviour, opting for the supposedly adult values of sound-mindedness, being goal-oriented, and a sense of obligation.

How easy it would be fall into this stereotype, conceding to the call of age, of time, and of the present. To pledge allegiance to social expectations, because the alternative, uncertainty, is a disposition that men fear with the same progression as they do with age. That the closer you are to your deathbed, the more you fear its eventuality, thus consequently turning the most free-spirited of us into jaded, indifferent, flawed pragmatists and cynics. That to become an adult, or mature, means to fall in line, to follow the flock, and to brand oneself with the searing humility of normalcy.

I do not detest convention, though. But one has to realize that even what is typical is subjective. Admittedly, I am not one to follow social norms. I had a brief grade school, but a rather lengthy undergraduate experience. My high school was not the usual, I was too young to identify with the hormonal transition of my peers, and the school itself was cutthroat that youthfulness was deemed a liability. While most of my colleagues in college obsessed over the latest Nokia phone, or figuring out the next party, concert, mosh pit, or acoustic night they’re going to that weekend (although I’ve had my share of inebriated debauchery to my capacity), I was working full time, already beginning to immerse myself in the industry that I intend to be in. I’ve been working since 2001, on my second year of architecture school, and yet I only took the licensure examination last January.

My life has been a journey of contradictions, of taking alternative routes, and finding my own pace. I may not be a risk-taker, no brash visionary, or fierce influencer, but I do know what I am good at. I take pride in the work that I do, and do not regret all the sidesteps, speedbumps, adrift periods, and misplaced intentions along the way. I owe a lot to these incongruencies, giving delectable texture to an otherwise insipid existence.

In this life I have been a brazen social butterfly, and a lonely library habitué, an affected party animal, and a depressed flailing fool, a competitive ace student, and a disgraced multiple-repeater. I have lived at the edge, and have been an outsider.

They say life begins at thirty, I say life begins when you choose it to. Forget about the norms, and social expectations, they are encumbrances to the potential an open mind can afford. Life is pregnant with enough potential for you to draw from. Temper your own sword. I am thankful to the serendipities that peppered my journey; they imbibe my story with footnotes worth revisiting. I embrace thirty with the warmth of a friend awaited for long, and the genesis of a good book that promises a most satisfying conclusion.





Original image from here.

In numerology, the number 30 represents the circle, or cycle. The circle, being the geometric expression of completion and infinity, symbolizes the continuous yet constant nature of existence along a timeline. When the degrees of a full cycle are divvied against the 12-hours of time, it yields the number 30. Minutes and hours are measured in 60’s, two 30’s whose halves embody the duality of time, the placement of the present: the half that occurs after, and the half that occurs before. Thirty is also considered as the prime age of a young adult, the beginning of the 2nd 30-year cycle where man is his at his peak potential. It is also the period in which economic cycles occur, the shifts between growth and depression.

It's also Antoni Gaudí's, Robert Venturi's, Álvaro Siza Vieira's, and Santiago de Tezanos' birthday today. Cool.