One of truest clichés of life, every life, is how quickly time begins to pass after a certain age. This summer has felt like the shortest summer of my life. Maybe it’s because of all the momentousness it contained, including getting “married” and nesting in our second home in Los Angeles. Maybe time just takes on a distinctive texture when you find yourself in your thirties.
I expected this summer to feel similar to past summers—summers defined by long, lethargic days that unwind like spools of cotton candy, a Lana del Rey song mistily enveloped in a yearning for both the future and the past at the same time; summers punctuated by grandiose, hyperbolic feeling, grief you can reach out and touch, euphoria you can feel beneath your breath.
This summer, trickling gently into fall, was first defined by rupture, then by a languid contentment. These days, I feel full—a fulfillment that’s tactile. It’s walking home from dinner hand-in-hand in the late-summer, indigo-velvet night; impossibly orange sunsets behind palm tree silhouettes; it’s endless wonder—at a great unknown, great luck, a great love. It’s garden dinner parties and homemade pasta, my friends speaking to me in the love languages of my childhood, the uncomplicated yet luxurious languages of home-cooked meals and books in the mail. And generosity—generosity so opulent I could cry, generosity from the least expected, an unpredictability that reframes your beliefs, your worldview (more on that later).
I’ve been thinking about what we’re each in pursuit of these days, and how we might live our values while in this pursuit (more on that later too). Throughout college, I was in a relationship with someone two years ahead of me. We were apart as much as were together. I remember telling a friend that I felt like I was always on a cliff’s edge, looking for something at the border of where sky meets earth, waiting for something. She responded: “that doesn’t seem like a good way to live.”
She’d be happy to know that, for the first time, I no longer feel like I’m waiting. Everything is happening right now, yesterday, today, on this tender day in October. And it always has been, hasn’t it? I just haven’t been paying attention. Instead, I was ceaselessly searching, subtly terrified of what might happen should I have nothing else to pursue, when all the meaning I’ll find—or make—exists in the particulars, in the details. I believed that searching was essential to my sense of self; that my identity could only be found in the spaces in between, in the protective silence and solitude of my unanswered questions. This summer, I stood still—and I discovered that I am as indelibly, wholly myself in this full-bloom promise of a god, in this flowering of serenity, as ever before.1 Maybe this is what I’ve been waiting for all this time.
Of course, everything is subject to change. Of course, most things are out of our control. I accept this with an apprehension that resounds in my marrow.