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The late twenties early thirties panic:

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My twenty-eighth birthday was this month. And somehow where twenty-seven felt natural, twenty-eight feels so much older. twenty-eight is almost thirty, twenty-eight is my twenties coming to a close. It’s crazy what one year will do to your perception of age. I don’t know if I’ll have that deep emotional response to turning thirty, only time will tell, but as for twenty-eight, I feel a little behind, I’m not sure why, I’ve reached all the points on my self imposed timeline, but somehow I feel like I should be doing more.

I’ve talked about how our culture extends adolescence into our twenties, and how it’s a relatively new phenomenon, and I’ve talked about how I’ve tried to avoid it, but somehow I’m reaching my late twenties wondering if I should be more at this age. I don’t know why, I’m a wife, mother, and homeowner with a full time job. I’ve reached my milestones. I’m very happy with my life. I’ve made good choices.

This lingering feeling isn’t abnormal, I’ve heard it from my friends who are also nearing thirty. How we expect people to go from their free and wild twenties to their mature and developed thirties almost overnight I’ll never know. It’s a deep flaw in the way we view certain ages as mature and others as not.

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Go home and love your family.

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“If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.”
–Mother Teresa

This quote has always been one of my favorites, because there is a deep truth to it. I’ve spoken before about how you should try to change the world on a smaller scale rather than a larger one and talked about how the small acts of kindness and selflessness are more earth shattering than people know. It’s all true and I stand behind it. Small acts of love change peoples lives. You don’t know what simply changing one life does. It starts a ripple effect that moves on through the world.

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Practicing your habits and creating pathways.

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I’ve been working the last three weeks on minimizing my screen time. I’m not doing great at it if I’m being honest, I’m still on social media a lot. I work online and I spend a chunk of my down time online. I like feeling informed and I work in marketing, of course I like consuming media!

But in this process, though I haven’t gotten rid of a ton of screen time, I have been spending more time on my hobbies. I’ve been seeing the horse more for longer stretches of time. I might get online afterwards, but the extra farm time counts for something when it comes to my goals and it counts as a lot when it comes to my mental health.

Even slight improvements turn into bigger strides. I’ve read a number of books on forming habits, and I can’t remember which one it came from, but a book introduced me to a new way of thinking about habits. You have to practice them like you do your skills. Even small steps are setting up links in your brain, creating pathways so next time you take another step you can build out even more. Practicing your habits. It’s not that novel of a concept, but as someone who always thought about habits as complete reforms it gave me an insight to how I could realistically improve.

Small steps, always moving forward. I can do that.

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Seven Things:

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First of all- Happy Halloween! I hope it’s spook-tacular! I can’t believe we are already at the end of October, this year seems to be flying by. But if you have a few spare minutes to take in the day (perhaps while waiting for Trick-or-Treaters) here are some links for you to enjoy discovering and reading through!

Anna Down South: Some Updates

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I got rid of my premium WordPress account, so if you notice an ad or two on this site, I’m sorry. I couldn’t justify spending money on it at this point, with the new house and the wedding coming up, so when it came up for renewal I let it pass.

I love this corner of the internet. I use it to talk about my thoughts and feelings, and as much as I hope it helps you, I know I do it mainly for myself. I enjoy the outlet. My whole life I’ve struggled to put my feelings and views into words when speaking, but I’ve never had that problem while writing. It’s why this dyslexic girl majored in English despite it being tougher than normal. Writing is just part of who I am, it’s how I process most everything, and reading back on my past posts here has made me realize how our lessons often need to be learned again and again. They just don’t take quite like they should.

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Easter Sunday: Killing our ideals and being unwilling to sacrifice.

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It’s hard not to think about sacrifice on Easter. God sacrificing his only son, Jesus sacrificing himself, all so that we may be forgiven of our sins. It’s the biggest sacrifice of all, for the innocent to die willingly for the guilty.

I was reflecting on the topic Saturday, but it started differently, without all the praise, but instead with a firm realization that I wasn’t very good at sacrifice.

I have a lot of good traits, I’ve done a lot of good things, but I like to tack on good deeds, I like when I can add them on without getting rid of other things I enjoy. The people on the receiving end never seem to mind. I still feel good about doing the good deeds. It seems like a win win, but it isn’t. You can’t only go out of your way to do the right thing or the kind thing when it’s convenient.

We all have a few people in our life that we’ll go the extra mile for, but it tends not to be a large group. This is one of the oldest problems. We think people have to earn that level of sacrifice. We’re stingy with it. I’m especially so when it gets in the way of things I enjoy, so much so that I don’t like sacrificing things for myself. I was praying about my health because I am still fighting the end of lyme disease and God helped me pray myself into a corner. I’ve been running low on effort, I’m tired of being sick, I don’t want to go the extra mile even though it would only be benifiting myself.

Now that gets you thinking. I won’t even make the long term sacrifices for my own benefit so I’m pretty positive that I’m not making enough sacrifices for others.

The goal with this life is to live as close to your ideal as possible. For Christians that ideal is Christ. We’ll never reach his level of sacrifice, but we could all stand to make more, for ourselves, for others, for humanity. It’s a tall order, and as much as we’d like to pretend we don’t understand how mankind put our savior on the cross, I think we all do. We would rather kill our ideals than try and join them. It’s less work. It’s easier.

But as it was then, it’s the wrong way. So stop listening to yourself when you’re trying to convince yourself that nobody’s perfect and it doesn’t matter if you sin one more time, sacrifice one less thing, enjoy more luxury then you should. Stop killing the ideals you would like to reach.

I’ll be here trying to do the same, failing at it, then trying again, hoping to get a few wins in between loses.