Why does no one tell you that from 20-25 your entire perception of the world, the deepest longings of your soul, everything that seemingly makes you “you” will change. Will be turned over. Spilled out. Deconstructed, Reconstructed, maybe more than once. Why does no one tell you? Why aren’t there classes? Why don’t the millions of those who have passed through the fire tell us? Whoever you think you are right now, in five years you won’t recognize or remember this you. Life will take you and batter your sails over and over and over. Hopeful naivety is a luxury of the young.

Not that it’s all doom & gloom post college, far from it. It’s simply that you are no longer that person. You don’t know why, perhaps you didn’t even notice the change until it had happened. But you wake up one morning, somewhere in your 26th year and you realize the immediacy of things. We are not immortal. There is no later. There is no someday. Everything has deep, rich, beautiful meaning. It’s as if the film that blocked out all the bad in early years was also hiding the good. You see the good and bad play like light and shadow, never overwhelming each other, but because of the existence of one, it validates the existence of the other. You realize that pain = growth and growth = life and life well lived = peace. To hold contradictions in a symbiotic realm is the beginning of wholeness. You don’t need to fight anymore, there is no advisory. There is nothing to prove. Nothing to state. There is no “you” that is worth a damn.

Meaning no longer takes it’s lifeblood from success. Success is the enemy of meaning. It distorts truth, by inflating your sense of uniqueness. O that our elders would stop striving for the unattainable by methods that have been disproven time and time again. O that they would realize they can light the way to true growth, they can illuminate a better way. The only way.

If time travel becomes a reality I will pen an open letter to my twenty year old self. “Dear twenty year old me; in five years you will be dead. Do not fight it, do not fear it, do not confuse success with meaning. Die. Resurrect. And live”.

Every twenty year old dies at twenty-five. O that someone would have told us.