list of life

Oooooooookay. Deep breath everybody, deep breath.

I’m almost there. I’m nearly 30.

30!

I’ve been flashing back to high school chemistry class a lot over the last couple of days. For reasons that have long ago been lost to the mists of time, my lab partner and I used to scream out ’30!’ whenever we had to work on an in-class project. We thought ourselves pretty amusing and we never failed to crack each other up. I’m sure to our partially formed brains we were comic geniuses, but I wonder if maybe we’d just been inhaling too many fumes from the bunsen burner.

So whenever someone mentions my 30th birthday, I hear a newly post-pubescent voice scream ’30!’ in the back of my head and away I go.

People make such a fuss over aging these days, and the importance of hitting those all important decade milestones. I feel like I should have something more insightful to say about the gravity of hitting the big 3-0.

And I’ve got nothing.

Oh, when I went to my hairdresser last night I was a little bummed out that apparently I had a bunch of grey hairs in the back of my head where I couldn’t see them.

I also know that I’ve been trying to convince myself that my opponents on the Ultimate field are insanely fast. When in reality the truth is I’ve lost a step or two.

And eating smarter became a necessity a couple years ago as my expanding waistline told me that my vaunted metabolism had finally crapped out.

So yes, I’ve certainly noticed the effects of aging and no, I can’t say that I’m overly enamoured with it.

I used to have something in my wallet called the List of Life. I made my first list in high school when I was inspired by a guest speaker who said that making a list of things he wanted to accomplish in his life helped to keep him grounded over the years. My first list was fairly juvenile and had very little to do with reality. But the list helped me set some of my first concrete goals and gave me a sense of purpose. I finally had an idea about what I wanted to get out of my life.

I kept that list in my wallet and I took great pleasure in being able to cross off some of the more mundane items on it. (Graduate high school, get into my first choice of University)

Later on, during a particularly gruelling time in University, I revised the list, dropping some of the wilder items and adding rather lofty career goals. That revision helped to refocus and reinvigorate me at a time when I was feeling overwhelmed by the pressures of post-secondary education.

(At that time I also created the first ever appendix to the list. A series of bullet points about the elements I thought were crucial to good filmmaking. A goodly portion of my university angst was centered around the difficulties in shepherding my film projects through to completion.)

The List of Life 2.0 languished in my wallet for years, becoming delicate and frail from being folded and unfolded so many times.

The last time I remember seeing it was on my first date with my now wife. In a fit of hubris I had the balls to pull that list out of my wallet and show her the many things I planned to accomplish with my life. To her credit S read the list and managed to avoid laughing in my face.

Since then the list has been misplaced, most likely to prevent further degradation to it’s worn folds. An in-depth search about a month ago failed to turn up even a trace of it.

As I approach my 30th birthday (30!) it was inevitable that I would succumb to a certain amount of reflection about how I got to where I am today. I find myself wanting to create yet another list, not just to remind me about what I want to get out of life, but also to remember what I have accomplished over the course of my time here.

The list of life meant a lot of things to me. It was a physical reminder to keep striving to reach my goals. It was the repository of the hopes and dreams of an optimistic and naïve 15 year old. It was where a struggling artist scribbled a hasty manifesto about his art. It was the first time I opened up in a meaningful way to my wife.

I intend to rewrite that list, because I can’t stop wondering what it will mean to me now.