Turning 33

Friday was my 33^rd birthday. It seems like that should be special in some way because of the double number, no doubt somewhere it is of cultural significance. In some ways I feel old. I look back on the last birthday that I remember, that was turning 30 while going to Nepal, and I feel like that was a long time ago. I was a bit more fit and the future was a bit more fresh and open.

About ten years ago I read an obituary in the Door County Advocate. Some guy on a motorcycle had died on the notorious 2 lane highway that stretches up the county. I guess he pulled out onto it when he shouldn’t have. I can’t remember his name, but I do remember he was a professor of some sort. What struck me about the obituary was the tone. It was celebratory of a life well lived, though this man was only in his early 50’s. One of his friends wrote about when he and the professor were kayaking up to a glacier in Alaska and the professor pulled out two glasses and some whiskey. They broke off a piece of the glacier and had some 10,000 year old ice. I thought that story was so cool, who does that?

What I think of the most are all over the past 15 years are the what-ifs and might-be’s. I would guess that most people do on their birthday, but I don’t think of them as regrets or dreams of what might have been. When I think of them what I remember is not the idea of uncertainty holding me back, but rather spurring me on. All those what-ifs make life exciting and interesting to live. They make me want to go see it, go do it, go eat it, jump from it and embrace it. Of course, I am afraid sometimes. Uncertainty is a vast and empty ocean. It would be madness not to be afraid or have doubts, but it would also be madness to allow that fear to dictate your life.

Though I was hoping that this year the number of countries I’ve travelled to would have met my age, it hasn’t yet. Currently I’ve been to 29, 30 will come in March when Aya and I go to the Philippines. Mongolia is near enough that I will probably go there sometime in the near future and a friend and I are talking about taking the trans-Siberian which would mean Russia and possibly some other Nordic countries as well in summer 2016. I’ve got a friend living in Denmark, which I haven’t been to yet, so that is possible too. Myanmar and Laos aren’t too far away either. It’s a big world out there and I would hate to miss it. Hopefully I will get to have a glacial ice and whiskey one day too, maybe to celebrate 50 countries at 50 years old. How cool would that be?