As my husband so kindly put it, I'm turning 29 again this month. The past couple months, to the annoyance of my friends, I've been lamenting about the end of an era, the end of a glorious feast called the 20s. Perhaps it's because once as a child, my eyes fell on a book on my aunt's bookshelf titled: "Thirty: The party is over." Or because I love the word chong-choon in Korean and sei-shun in Japanese that literally mean the color green and spring, or the springtime of life. The other day, as I was telling my mom about walking through Central Park with a close friend and sharing a cup of coffee and cupcake in the middle of the day, she asked me, how is it that your chong-choon is lasting so long?
So this certain wistfulness in turning 30 (there, I said it) lies in wanting the spring time of my life to last forever. The thrill of the unknown, the ability to travel on a whim, the right to be young and fresh. But I guess spring year-round wouldn't be too fun either. Once again, C.S. Lewis managed to hush my restless heart with his words.
"This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies. It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go -- let it die away -- go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow -- and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life.
It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors openings all around them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy."
- from Mere Christianity
