A Letter To Myself At 30

Are you ready to start over?

You must reconsider who you are and what you believe in, because everything you know about yourself is about to be challenged.

I know your introversion, what it has saved you from, the hours spent alone and well spent probing the deepest parts of your heart to learn what defines and unmakes you.

Flip the strength and you will find a strong weakness: the aloofness that stands between you and your calling to reach people, not to be known but to help them know how uninhibited and beautiful life can be.

You will break with your natural convention or stay small. You will reach out and collaborate against your will or remain captive within the confines of your inclinations.

I know you did not build this trap, it is the skin you came in. But you will adapt or die painfully, you will shed this skin for the good waiting beyond yourself.

I know your terrible fear of commitment, that compulsive reluctance to hold on to anyone because holding requires that you open up and it kills you to be so vulnerable to another human.

But you will commit, I swear you will. You will yield space to another heart, let yourself fall and refuse to pick yourself up. You will learn that life is about letting people in, letting them love you and letting them pick you up.

See, your heart is too big for you alone. Share it.

Your spirit is too free to live in a loveless cage. Let it fly.

Your soul is too lovely to be hidden. Unwrap it.

Personal space is underrated, maybe. You guard yours jealously.

But it is also overrated.

So, make room,
Love is a mansion,
And your heart can be a home if you open the door.

Make room,
Kindness is a tree,
And your life can be a shade if you let it grow.

Make room,
Help is an open hand,
And yours cannot if they are fists.

I speak to you like Heaven speaks to me: clearly and without pretense, every moment I care to listen.

Heaven does not speak less than it used to, the world is just noisier.

Come to stillness. Pause for the God of your existence, the One who orders your destiny by design.

With each rising decibel of busyness, the Voice that matters most of all is drowned out. And if you cannot hear love and mercy, what will you make of your life?

Take a break for silence.

Maybe the noise is in the applause, a fallout of the requisite self-congratulatory routine that follows the routine of pursuit and achievement. Shut it out.

The pursuit of happiness is a great distraction, the pull of making it will make you less than you were made to be. Be joy, be a blessing, be a miracle.

People will clap, do not play the winner. You are not lord of this stage, the curtains are not in your control. The script is forever unfolding, you do not know the end.

Forget what the world says you are and what it allows you become. You live for so much more than the pride of human progress, and glory begins where humanity turns back.

Do not rush to embrace the enlightenment of a world that has crowned the wrong kings. Listen, a man will never rise above what rules him. Reconsider your bowing.

Your body is a temple. Reconsider who you worship, or what: the gods of this age are things as much as they are idols.

You are a man, but only you can decide what that means.

Stay soft, stay flexible. Hard people do not just break, they shatter.

Be the arms that are always willing to hold, the heart that is always eager to learn and the ears that stay open.

Cynicism is making the rounds, opt out. The possibilities of an ordinary life are extraordinary, keep the faith.

This is the beginning of becoming the best version of yourself. Carry on.