The past 10 years have provided some interesting and varied tastes of life:
- I traveled outside North America for the first time.
- I lived and worked on a reservation in rural north-central Washington.
- I went back and worked in D.C. for a few years.
- I became a wilderness EMT.
- I spent a wild summer in Alaska.
- I earned a master’s degree.
- I started — and stopped — a PhD program.
- I became an Akimbo coach.
That’s a pretty good list, and I’m grateful for the head starts that sent me down some of those paths and glad of the spirit of adventure that I cultivated. As always, the greatest joys came from saying yes to the most unusual and (often) risky-seeming opportunities.
What feels different now, though, is a gradual but no less real move from wanting to let a thousand flowers bloom to wanting to grow a tree — or perhaps at least a garden.
Of course, it’s always tough to choose, and I don’t want to give up the taste for adventure or sampling what life has to offer in different places and circumstances. But I do want to see what it might feel like to branch out from a more stable foundation than in the past.
No matter what, cheers to another interesting and fun decade. I trust the list of activities in my 30s will both build on what I did in my 20s and hold some new adventures and surprises altogether.
Colin Steele 