7 things I didn’t think I’d be/do/have done by 27

My 27th birthday was on Tuesday, and as I was nearly freezing to death on my mid-morning wake-up run, I reflected on how unlikely this activity-- on my birthday, no less-- would have been 10 years ago.  And so this post was born...

1.     Go for a run in the morning when it’s below freezing, and consider it fun

I never thought, when I was that out-of-shape kid walking, not because I didn’t want to run but because I couldn’t, with the outcasts in the back during run-a-mile day in gym class, that I would find myself out here, on my 27^th birthday, running in freezing temperatures for over an hour, my arms numb and my nose tingling, not out of loyalty to an exercise regimen or because someone had forced me into it, but because I wanted to.  Out there on Keene’s green pedestrian bike trail, I could feel the leaves frosted and crashing about my feet, the wind harsh on my forehead, the sun dropping hints of warmth through dappled pines.  In the pauses between songs I heard the trash of leaves and feet, my heavy breathing, and not much else.  The occasional dog or biker or jogger, the occasional thrum of a car nearby, empty off-season golf courses and post-migration empty nests.  No one needed to tell my younger self that there is magic in the world, or that a walk outside can reveal it to you, let loose the thoughts in your head into words and ideas to spew desperately on paper back inside the house before they drift away on the wind.  But you could not have convinced that younger girl that running, that pounding the knees and reddening the cheeks, that panting on frozen breaths and feeling hot and cold and dizzy at the same time, would be a positive addition to the equation.

Back when I was the young bookish introvert reading Harry Potter in the corner of the library, back then when I was a few pounds over-weight and under-confident, I viewed exercise with equal parts envy and disdain, an activity for over-competitive jocks and shallow body-conscious fools.  A fit body was something I wanted but couldn’t have, not when my lack of coordination and inability to psych myself up for something I knew was just a game made me an unpopular and unenthusiastic teammate in any sport, not when a 90-second jog on the treadmill left me breathless and unable to go on.  I was the kid who pretended sports were un-cool because I didn’t get them, wasn’t fast enough to follow the rules or competitive enough to care.

Whether it was middle-school softball or gym class, it was immensely clear that sports just were not made for me, that exercise and I simply didn’t fit.  College only proved my point: halfway through a semester-long rock climbing class, I fell from a very low height and, in a freak accident, snapped two bones in my right leg.  I wasn’t just too lazy to get into shape; for every instance of laziness there were more examples of me trying and failing due to my own physical inadequacy, as if fate herself was telling me not to bother.  As I slowly worked my way up to sprinting and fast walking on the college treadmill again, I came to accept that exercise would always be a chore, and one to which I was ill-suited.  I learned to respect fitness, to love yoga and fast walking and even dance (that’s a sport.  Trust me), but could find nothing fun nor un-embarrassing enough to hold my attention long enough to start me up the mountain toward healthy living.

Sometimes when you refuse to go to the Mountain, the Mountain comes to you.  My Mountain was a bicycle.  It was a heavy thick-tired trek something-or-other, black and a little on the large side, given to me by the Peace Corps upon my arrival in Zambia along with a shiny red helmet, which other seasoned bike riders (read: just about everyone) disdained but accepted as a useless precaution required by a liability-conscious US government.  I clung to my helmet, wished for helmets on my knees, my elbows, my flip-flop-wearing toes.  Other volunteers lived close enough to the training building to walk there, but I was staying with a host family a couple of kilometers away, up and over dirt-road hills and through patches of sand that turned to mud after the daily rains.  There wasn’t an option here—no stomachache to fake, no lower setting on the treadmill, just me and the Mountain and an obligation to meet, classes to go to and no option of going slower.  The heart rate would rise and my face would turn red and I would not stop to rest and that was the end of it.  Every day, there and back again, a half hour that slowly turned into 20 minutes, a waistline that slowly shrunk.

I didn’t climb the Mountain because I wanted to.  I had given up on dreams of fit and thin, long abandoned any interest in sports and games, resigned myself to weak muscles and yoga or pilates to keep me from sinking into a puddle of nothing.  I wasn’t trying to lose weight or build muscle or teach my body endurance.  I was just trying to get to class every day.  I was trying to prove to myself that I could survive here.  Surviving Peace Corps Zambia was the Mountain I aimed for; physical fitness and mad skillz on a bicycle was a Mountain I climbed by accident, anecdotally.

So here I am 3 hears later, sweaty and cold from a run, my muscles frozen but my brain clear and active, just like it was all though years ago when I would “exercise” by walking around the block.  I still don’t run marathons, I’m lucky to run 20 minutes without needing to walk for a second and get my breath back, but I do run now.  I still don’t like sports, but I haven’t forgotten the day I gave into peer pressure and joined some of my fellow volunteers for a game of volleyball—still not my favorite pastime, but I was as shocked as anyone to discover I wasn’t as horrible at it as I was in high school gym, that I wasn’t as hopeless as I had thought, and boy did it feel good to be in a group, even if they did all seem bizarrely intent on winning.  I’m not ashamed of myself for tripping over air, or embarrassed to be uncoordinated and clumsy or red-faced and sweaty.  And I still fall off my bike, just like I did in a patch of mud on that very first day.  But I’m not afraid of it anymore.

2.     Speak a foreign language almost no one else speaks, and do it well

I was never all that good at languages.  I wasn’t awful at high school Spanish and made a passing attempt at classical Greek when I thought I might be a classics major, but my attempts to learn French for Peace Corps (back when they thought they’d send me to West Africa instead of Southern) were an abject failure, and despite my belief that other people should not be required to learn English—that we should all make an effort to learn each other’s languages in basic form, and that it isn’t fair to go into someone else’s country and expect them to speak your language—I found it easier to talk the talk (or not) than walk the walk, and relied on the ESL population to carry me through my own linguistic ignorance.

So when I sat down in my 3-person Bemba-language-group class for the first time in February 2010, I did not believe with any confidence that I could become fluent in this Zambian tribal language only spoken by a couple thousand people.  I expected to learn a few basics, hello and thank you just for the sake of courtesy, and then have to rely on others to struggle through their basic-level English in order for us to communicate or accomplish anything over the next 27 months.

Imagine my surprise when I did well in that class, to the point where I was offering study hints and pneumonic devices to my classmates, to the point where my teacher was nominating me to give a speech in Bemba at our swearing-in ceremony.  My friends from Peace Corps might think it absurd that I ever doubted my ability to learn a foreign language.  It was an ability I didn’t know I had, something for which I was sure I lacked the attention-span and the dedication.

And it turned out to be one of the greatest gifts I received in my time in Zambia.  There were plenty of moments where I was befuddled by language, that I sat in a circle of happily babbling ladies around a reed mat shelling maize and completely failed to comprehend what they were saying, that I had to lean over to my counterpart to have them translate a meeting for me (and I never led a meeting without a counterpart there), that I confused the word for bag with the word for frog, or the word for hair with the word for dirt.  But some of the best moments I had in Zambia came from this local dialect being slowly edged out by the English-language globalization initiative.  Like the times a Zambian woman would address a question about me to my host mother, and I would jump in to answer myself, or the times I would sit in a meeting and realize with a small smile that I was following every word of it.  There was the time I argued indignantly in rapid-fire Bemba with a man overcharging for the local bus fare, or the time my translator couldn’t think how to translate “harvest a beehive” into Bemba and I did it for him.  I could ramble in Bemba, explain nuances of Bemba grammar and translation to my fellow volunteers (not that they necessarily wanted to listen to it), and even kept lists of Bemba words that sounded similar, for my own curiosity.  And through all of it, I never stopped being pleasantly surprised that I actually understood this, that this was a part of my mental processes now.

And maybe I should have known better, should have realized that an English major with a musical background—someone who has grown accustomed to picking up the rhythms and patterns of language, who navigates grammar on instinct and memorizes lyrics through habit—would take to a foreign language relatively easily, once forced into it.  But it honestly wasn’t something I ever expected to be good at—speaking one language eloquently is hard enough!

This past summer I backpacked through a large portion of Eastern and Southern Europe.  I didn’t learn all the languages of all the people I visited, but I did make a point of at least learning to say hello and thank you wherever I went—I had always believed that it was only polite to learn a few key phrases in the language of any country you are visiting, as a sign of good will toward your hosts, and now I knew I could actually walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

3.     Walk across the rim of Victoria Falls with only hands to hold me

You don’t always know you’re going to do something crazy until you do it.

Sometimes you have a vague idea that you might do it, someday.  This happened with Peace Corps—a vague whispering in the back of my head that drew me to an information session my freshman year, and an application 3 years later.  And there’s stuff you always knew you would do, but never expected to actually happen.  Like riding an elephant.  Or petting a cheetah.  Or singing the lead in your favorite musical on stage.

That last one never happened.  Sometimes dreams don’t.  I think sometimes life isn’t always about fulfilling dreams—some dreams, like being a broadway singer, you hang on to until you get older and discover better dreams to reach for, like finding the courage to sing and play guitar in a circle of friends around a campfire.  But some of those never-dreams happen, like visiting an elephant orphanage and gently petting an extremely young baby elephant.  Crazy dreams aren’t impossible dreams.

But then there are the crazy not-dreams, the things you never planned on doing, never dreamed of doing, until suddenly there you are shuffling along a small cement waterfall lip in a line, holding hands with friends and acquaintances while stumbling through rocky pools, all the time feeling the ominously innocent pull of a current feet away from the drop of the largest waterfall in the world.  There was no planning, here.  I didn’t wake up that morning and say “well, it’s new years, time to climb across the top of a waterfall.”  But it wasn’t a matter of “all my friends are doing it,” either.  I think I went along with it because I didn’t want to look back on that moment and think “this was the time I could have done something amazing and crazy, but instead I stayed in the tourist trap parking lot outside the greatest waterfall in the world, getting propositioned by men selling tourist trinkets at tourist kiosks.”  I made a split-second decision that that wasn’t what I wanted my life to be.  Just like you can let go of some dreams, you can suddenly discover unexpected ones, too.

And when we reached that pool, others diving in while I waded and swam gently, almost reverently, across to the outcropping on the rim, I looked over the rim of the falls and across the falling mist to where the tourists stood in the safe part of the park and thought yes, this was worth it.

I’m not an adventurous person.  I’m probably never going to jump out of an airplane or go parasailing, and while one can never really say never, I can say with certainty that I will never be the type to love an adrenaline rush so intently that I go bungee jumping on a regular basis just to chase that feeling.  An adventure for me will always be an anomaly, something I do once just to know that I could.

Of course, one could argue that sitting somewhere watching the clouds go by is its own sort of adventure, in the right context.

4.     Wear a skirt. Swear.  Get drunk.  Eat spinach.

I know, this is small and a little bit silly, but did you ever wake up one morning and suddenly decide that your whole outlook had changed?  Like you used to love brussel sprouts and now you hate them, or you hated spinach and now you love it (Has anyone actually tried spinach lately?  Sautee it for about a minute in garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice, and you have instant awesome green on your plate.  Why did no one ever tell me this healthy thing was actually kinda easy?)?

Or when you’re seven you just decide tomboy jeans are so much cooler than that puffy pink dress your grandmother made, and you change your wardrobe and never look back unless absolutely necessary.  And then one day you’re 24 and browsing through the second-hand racks at a consignment shop and you see this beautiful old-fashioned skirt, and then another one at a thrift shop, and another and another and suddenly you’re really into stockings and skirts and knee-high boots?  Sometimes these things just happen, ok?

The point is, there’s a lot of stuff in the world and you never know what’s going to appeal to you or when.  Forming an opinion on something trivial and clinging to it can only limit you.  I can’t imagine what my stubborn seven-year-old self would say if she saw the way I dress, the food I eat, the shows I watch, the books I read (well, maybe she’d approve of that last one).  I’ve made it a habit too often in life deciding I did or didn’t like something and staunchly announcing this opinion for the world, only just as genuinely to change my mind 5 years later.  I never thought I’d come to regret some of my more obstinate moments (but not all of them) and strive for a more open mind.  You never know how volleyball, or wine, or spinach, or skirts, are going to look to you in a decade; I “knew” a lot when I was little, but I never knew how much and how often I would come to change my mind.

I've changed my mind about words.  I used to think words were significant for their meaning alone, that for every statement there was a proper wording and grammatical structure, and that slang, swears, and good heavens conjugations had no place there.  People who used words incorrectly, who followed the connotation or the tone instead of the dictionary definition, who called their friends names and meant it in a positive, affirming way, who said one thing and meant another or said nothing and asked you to read their face, who treated "LOL" as a word that could be used in conversation or said "like" without the accompanying simile, were fools and grammatical heathens.  I used to think swears were always bad, and compliments always good.

These days I cuss freely, mix GRE words with "like" and "totally" and "kinda," spit out terms like "desire lines" and "champagne rain" just for the nonsensical way they fit the mood, not because I've gotten loose or forgotten my English-language training, but because I've learned language isn't what we write down in dictionaries.  Language is fluid, not a lawbook but an oral tradition, something that evolves and changes as we do.  Each word and sorta-word, from "kinda" to "ROTFLMAO" to "@#%&#$%," has it's place in the universe, it's own sort of conversation.  And while I continue to be of the belief that LOL should be left in the cyber-conversation where it belongs, and that "like" should be an occasional conversational filler for poetic flow and not a nervous verbal tick, I also believe in the split infinitive, the fragment, and the well-timed curse.  Because language is an art form, and like all art it changes with the time, the culture, the person, the situation.  It is more than its rule-book.

And sometimes swearing just feels so damn good.

And then there’s alcohol.  I still can’t say I’m as fond of the stuff as some people.  Some of it still tastes like cough syrup, and I’ve spent more time drinking to be a part of the party than out of any great love for the taste or its effects.  But like a curse word at the right moment, sometimes a good beer or a glass of wine is the best thing at the end of a long day.  Now how do I explain that to my 5-year-old self?

5.     Climb Mount Kilimanjaro

The Lion King was my favorite film as a child.  I was young enough then that going to see the same Disney cartoon in theaters 6 times in a row didn’t turn any heads—this is what is expected of young kids.  Ask my parents for my greatest hits, and they will likely come out with Star Wars or Harry Potter, or if they’re confusing me with my sister then The Sound of Music.  But my first love wasn’t fantasy or sci-fi or musicals or even Disney.  My first love was lions on an African plain.

This is the thought I reached back to when standing in the desolate desert of Kilimanjaro’s fire-hill plains below the summit, searching around scrub brush and red red boulders for a safe place to crouch and piss.  Behind me as I stumbled around I could see the glacial summit pouring through the crystal clouds, a place I’d climbed to the very top of and back down to here again in 24 hours.  My feet were numb and my legs were rubber, my neck was sunburned and my face was red, I had dust all over my clothes and in my pores.  But there was that cloud-circled summit, those opening bars of my favorite childhood film painted in front of me real and present and stuck to the bottoms of my boots.  What had just been a childhood dream was real and in front of me, wonderful and unexpected.

It’s strange how you can not know how much or how long you’ve wanted something until it’s there.  I certainly didn’t sit in the audience of The Lion King on stage and think “I want to climb Kilimanjaro,” or “I want to ride an elephant,” or “I want to go live in rural Africa for 2 years.”  But it sure felt surprising and good to get there.

6.     Live in a mud hut for 2 years without electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing, surrounded by people who don’t speak my language or understand my culture, with only a bicycle and the grocery

Ok, anyone else here tired of hearing me brag about the mud hut in Africa?  Yeah, I’m just gonna let this one speak for itself and move on…

7.     Still be friends with that girl from the other end of the cafeteria table 17 years ago

It’s strange to think about, being ten years old and meeting someone I would know for longer than I’d been alive yet.  If I told my younger self she wouldn’t be able to fathom knowing someone that long, wouldn’t be able to fathom even living that long.  It’s a long time, seventeen years, and knowing it’s less than the extent of my lifetime can only mean one thing:

I’m getting old.

This is what I thought a few weeks ago, sitting under one of those big white tents and watching a bride and groom sway across a grassy dance floor.  The bride had dried leaves clinging up the hem of her dress, and this was how I knew her for who she was.  This was the same girl who used to sleep on my living room floor, the same girl who I kept smacking from the driver’s seat on the way back from our midnight bookstore raid because she was getting a head start on the newest Harry Potter book when I couldn’t possibly catch up without crashing and killing us all and it just wasn’t fair.  Her hair was a different color then, her body shorter and her face younger and rounder, her whole self less solid without this man here to hold her as she danced, but I still know this woman was that girl.  No one else would look so fairy-graceful in a dress doubling as a rake the way that she does; that elf-in-the-garden dress wouldn’t ever suit anyone else but her.

It’s odd because you never know at the time what moments are going to define you, what people are going to stick to you and stick around.  There were other people I knew better then, people I still run into on facebook, people who will always be a part of my formation—there in my graduation pictures, there at school dances and school plays, there when I got my college acceptance letter, there to fight suddenly with me in the hallway and make up by lunchtime, there for late night strolls through target, for brownie day in the cafeteria.  People I’ll see at some high school reunion and wonder where the friendship goes when it’s gone.  And when I was ten years old and sitting at the cafeteria table I had no way of knowing that the only person at the table I would still know in 17 years the friend-of-a-friend over there whose name I couldn’t quite remember.  Life moves funny, sometimes.

And here I was 17 years later at her wedding.  Isn’t it weird when your facebook stalker-stream is suddenly littered with wedding photos, girls you know by a different last name, houses and babies?  Where did the time go?  It happens in real life too—showing up at a wedding, squinting at guests until there’s a moment of recognition and oh how they’ve grown, there are boyfriends and girlfriends and kids now, new jobs and new haircuts and we all look a little more alive, don’t we, on the other side of high school?

And I know that this is nothing—if 27 years would have seemed like an absurdly long time when I was ten, think how small 27 will look from 54.  I keep blinking, at weddings, at parties, standing on the lip of Victoria Falls looking down into the abyss, and wondering “gee, how on earth did I get here?”

I think of my own wedding, sometimes—a hypothetical wedding I’m not even sure I ever really want to have—and re-evaluating my side of the guest list.  The list grows longer, and sometimes a little shorter, and as I get older I count the number of people who might have a family of their own to bring along.  And then I think of the other side of the aisle—how many parents, siblings, cousins, friends?  There’s a person I haven’t met yet—actually, there are probably several people—who will mean a lot to me, who right now are nothing more to me than a little girl sitting at the other end of the cafeteria, some friend of a friend whose name I am struggling to remember.

A lot of people are afraid of getting old, but I’m not scared so much as I am bowled over by it; I look at where I’ve come in 27 years, in 17 years, in 5, and I can’t wait to see what’s next, and what unknown people will be there.