YOU’RE ON THE CUSP OF 25

You were awake the moment the clock struck twelve on your twenty-fourth birthday. Sitting in the living room, having just returned from the wedding of two of the dearest spirits you know. Someone started singing soft and low, and in that moment, though you were on the tail end of the most liminal year you’d lived to date, you knew it was going to be sweet.

And it has been. Sweet isn’t the right word though - full, rooting, reconciling, stretching, maybe? Is there ever a year that isn’t? Stretching, I mean. You’re on the cusp of 25, and the world seems to be one perpetual span of liminal space.

Almost 12 months ago you sat in that diner you love, and admitted that you were failing - not for lack of imagination - to see a through thread in your life and work. What did it all add up to? And as only this one friend can do, she stared you down and stated calmly, if a little fiercely, “Well the way I see it, you’re in a gathering season - of people and experiences and skills and stories.”

And how right she would be. This year has been the redemption of, and the weaving together of, seasons past - the bringing together of people from almost every space and story of your life into a space of belonging.

Looking back, you’ll always remember 24 as the year of #BetterTogether or “Belonging.”

Well those words stuck like burrs, and so did a few others. You carried these questions and phrases with you like guides, like talismans, like prayers. Here are just a few that I hope you hold onto all your live-long days.

Big love is waiting.

There is no hierarchy of suffering.

The only way forward is together.

My future is bound up in yours.

“Day by day, old joy comes back to me.” ~ Meg Fee

Mercy means no one bolted.” ~ Ann Lammot

“We are each other’s business.” ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

How do we honour each other’s pain, and take it with us into a more whole future?

24 was the year you learned to “honour standing still” as your friend Jessica would say. And while your version of “still” remains remarkably different than many, you have begun to dig into this lesson in full. You have commitments marked for up to two months in advance in your calendar. You have said no to other opportunities, some of them very tempting, in order to root down into the place you have chosen to be. More than standing still, you have begun to build a life. You have chosen belonging. You have a tribe. There are folks 3 to 80 who love you better than you could ever deserve.

Here’s a snapshot of what this space in time has held.  

You took your first real vacation as an adult - not for work, not to volunteer, there was no educational tour. Just a holiday. It was magic. You gained a true gathered family in Ottawa. You slowed right down. You started reading voraciously. You’ve added a few fine lines around your eyes. You've crammed and been crammed around beautifully full tables at dinners, brunches, tea times and wine nights. Many people slept on your couch, floor, and your roommate's air mattress. You spent a hell of a lot of time on the phone with friends who speak to your heart. You danced to feel alive. Your littlest sister got married to her first and only sweetheart. You flew for three weddings and trained your way to another.

You’ve been welcomed into a lot of lives, and had the privilege of helping connect a few more folks to each other along the way. You’ve been shocked at people’s warmth, constancy and almost constantly surprised at people’s ability to quietly show up without your asking them to.

You wrote more articles than you felt brave enough to pen. It was good for you. You did your first radio interview. With the help of incredibly kind colleagues, you organized a cross-Canada Summit for dynamic young leaders of faith, gathered from coast to coast. They made you laugh, cry, and healed you deep down in a way you didn’t know you needed. You were honest about love. You were honest about anxiety. You uninvited several people who couldn’t respect your boundaries to your life. You felt stretched between people on more than one occasion, sometimes to the point where you might break - pack in this vision that you have of holding difference in tension. You asked for help. You hustled. You showed up. You met some of your heros. You kept some existing ones, and gained some others.

Just the other day, you passed a coffee shop that you once frequented when you were getting to know Ottawa four years ago. The manager waved wildly and you smiled in spite of yourself, going in, receiving a hug and kiss so enthusiastic you were startled into a place of belonging all over again.

Last spring, you came across this quote from Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Somewhere along the way, you got it mixed up with another quote and you’ve taken to saying, “Attention is the highest form of love.” You know now you were mistaken. But as Meg Fee would say, “even the misremembering feels important.” Attention is the highest form of love in many ways and that was the lesson you were actually supposed to carry with you. It’s carried you into this space of 25.

Birthdays bring a clarity and a simultaneous reflectiveness. We look back. We look forward. Last year’s birthday was marked by a deep unknownness of things. This year feels different.

This year your birthday feels different; you have an inner wholeness you didn’t have then. You’ve added a little more softness to your heart and a little more strength to your spine.

As you hope into your 25th year, I hope you can look back and see it as the continuation of what Pope Francis tells us to do: “to stand firm in hope” wherever “the Lord has planted you.” I hope to emerge with a deeper “knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness” as Jean Vanier counsels.

I hope you dig deep down into that shit-disturbing side too. Ask a few more questions, raise that voice, don’t fold yourself for others. I hope you doggedly stick to searching for that glimmer of hope and fiercely loving people back together again, even if that’s all they have in common with one another.

Remember what Parker J. Palmer said: “It’s an act of rebellion to show up as someone trying to be whole...as someone who believes that there is a hidden wholeness beneath the very evident brokenness of our world.” And I suspect this is the beginning and end of it, the vision for this next space of time. Start there. I expect the rest will work itself out.”