Another Trip Round the Sun

I made it to 27. I’m now the same age as Cobain, Hendrix and Winehouse all were when they died, and for whatever reason, whenever I think of 27, it being the age of their deaths is all I really associate this number of trips around the sun with.

I certainly don’t plan on joining in them in dying at 27, largely because (as I remarked last year) I would like to achieve the tiniest possible fraction of what they did before I do die, and clearly that is going to take a lot more time. I have reached the age where people around me have started fearing growing older - each extra year seems like it is their youth slipping away from them, like opportunities have been missed that will not reoccur, like things aren’t going to get any better from here. I don’t feel like that at all, quite the opposite. 26 was, in a lot of ways, the best year of my adult life so far. I started a new job which was a huge leap forward my career, and marked the first time I felt legitimacy in what I spent my 9-to-5 doing. I moved from tiny, comfortable, quaint Guernsey to big, scary, intense London, to try to soak in as much of its people, culture and experiences as I possibly good, in the hope that it’d broaden my horizons and I would indeed be able to make the best use of what’re allegedly going to be the best years of my life. I really fell in love with running, and ran my first marathon, then another, and then a couple of 50ks after that, just to really be sure that I was indeed enamoured with it. I made some new friends, strengthened existing relationships, and closed the book on some that weren’t serving me well.

So I’m not scared about getting older, or being in my late twenties, or the inevitable march of time or whatever. I seem to be on an upward trajectory as I age, and feel like I am making progress - albeit slow progress - with the whole, “figuring things out” thing, and so I am hopeful that in another 365 days time, I’ll be able to write a blog that says exactly the same as this one - that the last year was the best one so far.