30's the New 20, You Know...

According to Buddhist reasoning, we are all dying from the day we are born. Nobody knows their expiration date, but we all most certainly have one printed somewhere in invisible ink on our bodies.

By the time you reach your "You're Over the Hill Now, Welcome to 30" birthday bash, you've seen the start of roughly 11,000 new days. 11,000 glorious days of living, loving, and learning. Hopefully.

In reality, there aren't many people out there who realize that the current moment they are living may very well be their last, and although I would like to think that I am one of the exceptions to that rule, I normally am not. The consequence of that is living each day as if there were many more days ahead to have a happier existence, saving our bliss for a future date when we will have the opportunity to have the best time of our lives. A great quote comes to mind by an American author, Stephen Vincent Benet: "Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways." Hmmm. Who ever said we live our lives in thousands of uncaring ways? We definitely care, right?

We run around like hamsters eternally chained to our treadwheel, doing important things that will help us reach our important goals in our important, individual lives. We finish degrees we will never use (but we have the paper to prove we went to the boring, useless classes and passed), we spend thousands of dollars travelling to far off third world countries to live as the poor locals do (as if that will make us feel better and less materialistic), we perpetually party like it's 1999 (even though we've been there, and done that), we do yoga with the world's top gurus to help us clear our chakras (for a small fee), we replace our low-carb diets with no-carb diets (because this new diet surely has the right solution for your dietary needs), we run to the gym, we run at the gym, we run home to have our no-carb dinner alone, we "date" (if that's what you really want to call it), we get married (conjugal indebtedness), we have kids (who, unfortunately for most, mimick our every move), we get divorced (and join the 50% statistic), we go back to dating (with the help of some online matchmakers willing to find us the sugar daddy/sugar mommy of our dreams if we could only conjure up the right look and resume), we search for inner peace and happiness (by getting plastic surgery to change our outer look and feel better about ourselves). Every single aspect of our lives is designed to fit our hectic lifestyle. But what exactly are we doing here? Have we really found happiness in keeping ourselves busy with our own individual Important Things To Do lists of life, or are we just cramming as much as possible into our finite existence so as to not find ourselves bored, and scared, and ironically alone?

There's so much going on around us, and yet it all means nothing. You will not find reciprocal love from your BMW. You will not find an everlasting union with the overtime you work (till death do us part is unfortunately a reality for some workaholics and their jobs). You will not look back at the pictures of you being stressed out and consider them snapshots of cherished moments in your life.

Your life is now. No matter how many days you've lived, no matter how old you think you're getting, there's no use counting the days when the days you live don't really count for much in the end.

So maybe 30 is the new 20. Or the new 10. Or a time for rebirth before time expires.