Becca’s Cyber Home

I just discovered that school work goes much faster when you’re nursing a great glass of wine. OK, well, maybe not faster, but more pleasantly. This is the last week of my 3rd to last class (woohoo!), and the last weeks are always the hardest. There’s always a big team project due. And, I swear, these last few classes are the hardest yet. Not because of the course content, but because the constant grind of it has caught up with me. The day in and day out of dealing with life and work, with school on top of it all. I can’t imagine doing this with kids–I have such respect and awe for my classmates who manage all of this with young children too.

So, thanks to a light and fruity glass of Malvasia Bianca from St Clair Winery, my afternoon of chores and school work has been quite mellow. I forgot how nice it is to just sit and sip wine. There’s just something about a good glass of wine that prompts me to slow down, consider what I’m doing, focus a little more on the now instead of what I have to do for the rest of the evening.

Then, pair the wine with UB40 (a reggae band), and you’ve got a veritable massage for the senses. UB40 brings back so many memories for me. As I sip my wine, I can’t fight the flashbacks to my freshman year of college. 12 years have passed, but the wistful nostalgia is still so strong.

12 years. Wow. In less than 2 months I’ll be 30! Wow. I’ve told my friends that 30 isn’t a scary birthday for me, and it truly isn’t. But sometimes I’m still so shocked that I’m going to be 30! I can’t help but think on it. A lot.
I mean, I don’t feel 30! And it’s so weird sometimes to think that I can measure my life and file my memories in decades. When I’m not feeling slightly disconcerted about trying to reconcile my mental age with my physical age, this 30th birthday has made me pause to think about where I’ve been and where I’ve landed.

Turning 30 is a milestone, right? At milestones, we stop to gauge our progress and look ahead, right? Looking back on the last 12 years or so (because the first 18 hardly count–I feel like I didn’t really come into my own until my college years), it’s easy to see the turning points. The decisions and events that have landed me where I am now. At so many points, I could’ve done something else and my life would be SO different. That realization is unsettling, but oddly comforting, and definitely humbling.

I spent a lot of those 12 years believing that I wasn’t good enough, that I was somehow deficient and I had to constantly better myself. I think I still feel that doubt to some extent–convincing myself that my academically challenged undergraduate college years were abnormal is why I’ve been busting my butt to keep this 3.75 GPA for my Master’s degree. But all of a sudden today, I realized that turning 30 isn’t the only milestone this summer.

I think that’s what 30 is about for me. Finally recognizing and understanding that all of the angst and confusion of those 12 years were actually outweighed by the joy and growth. I finally see that the scared 20-something girl is going to be a 30-something woman with a whole lot of life to live. So I have now proven to myself that I’ve accomplished something with my life. But now it’s time to do something with it. What that will be, I don’t know. But staring down the Big 3-0 has taught me that it’s time to stop doing and planning, and just focus on living, loving, and growing every day.

“And every hour of every day I’m learning more
The more I learn, the less I know about before
The less I know, the more I want to look around”
(from UB40’s “Higher Ground”)

P.S. Jo, thanks for the great wine!