Last day of my twenties

Today is the last day in my whole life I can truthfully claim to be in my twenties. Though I've certainly had plenty of warning this was coming, I'm still not quite sure how to unpack that, mentally. I've always warily acknowledged the grain of truth in Billy Crystal's rant in the movie City Slickers:

Value this time in your life kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices, and it goes by so quickly. When you're a teenager you think you can do anything, and you do. Your twenties are a blur. Your thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money and you think to yourself, "what happended to my twenties?" Your forties, you grow a little pot belly you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud and one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother. Your fifties you have a minor surgery. You'll call it a procedure, but it's a surgery. Your sixties you have a major surgery, the music is still loud but it doesn't matter because you can't hear it anyway. Seventies, you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale, you start eating dinner at two, lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. And you spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate in soft yogurt and muttering "how come the kids don't call?" By your eighties, you've had a major stroke, and you end up babbling to some Jamaican nurse who your wife can't stand but who you call Mama. Any questions?

Depressed yet?

Adding to the sense of despair is that, according to an adage from the baby boomer generation, I've got exactly one day left of being considered trustworthy. Perhaps because our society has the generalization that as people get older, they lose their sense of openmindedness. Pearl S. Buck said it well:

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

But wallowing in despair, tempting though it may be, is not how I wish to ring in my fourth decade on this planet. After all, according to this quote my parents had hanging in their bathroom while I was growing up...

Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative (attributed to Maurice Chevalier).

So I've found a quote about aging that brings a smile to my face, from Jeanne Moreau:

Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age.

I'm extremely lucky to have someone in my life who I love very much, who has been my best friend, my partner, and the light in my life for over ten years now. We also have the joy and privilege to be surrounded by our loving families and many awesome friends, who have proven these past few weeks that they are there for us no matter what tragedy strikes. Not only that, I can't begin to count how often they make me smile, make me laugh, and just plain make my life better. I'm going to spend today with a couple of those awesome people, in fact.

So if all the joy I'm lucky enough to experience in life leads to a few premature laugh lines, bring it on. I'm going to continue to do everything I can to earn those laugh lines, filling in that time between each birthday with as much joy and fun as I can, so I can look back years from now and know that the party never ended, that I never gave up the joys of youth.

So goodbye, twenties, hello, thirties, and look out, world, because I'm going to pack as much awesome as possible into this next decade.