25

Now that I have fully lived a quarter of a century, does this mean anything to me? On one hand, it's just one more year that has gone by, with uncountable chapters of different genres of my life. But on the other, and symbollically, is it time yet for me to start thinking about what will be coming and what I wish to happen in the next quarter?

I have -inevitably- grown up. We all grow up every year, if not day. But since 25 is something like a small milestone that marks the path you are taking, reminding you of how far you have come and how many more miles you may need to get to where you want to be, I feel obliged to do some serious, but not stressful, (re)thinking.

Every morning on my way to the office, if not reading, I like to let my thought fly from here to there just to kill time. From shoes style of those who sit in front of me in the metro to the ever-changing digits of my mutual fund accounts or the imagined lives of the sufferers of Franquismo, I let it fly away to search for whatever that seems to catch the attention of my conciousness, no matter how small the subjects are. Morning is the best moment to do such mental activity as your mind is fully awake and desperately in need of some exercise.

However, this evening in particular, as the most inappropriate timing, cramped in a bus on the way home, I felt that my thought happened to find its way to one of the darkest corner hidden somewhere inside my brain and shouted "Hey! I know 25 is nothing for you, but don't you really wanna do something 'different' just to celebrate such insignificant arrival of age?". I replied "Well, then, what should I do?". Silence.

It seemed like it had simply left, just like a passerby, but only after having dropped a time bomb inside my head. The bomb was ticking. I was thinking. Something different, the arrival of age and its insignificance. What do they have in common? Probably they all share a common ground of my past; my youth and my childhood to be more specific. For years, I have experienced the joy of having very limited responsibilities, wishing to get older only to be more powerful and able to make my own decision while ignoring the possible consequences that might come with it. 25 is a long time for a person to fully enjoy such thing, though some are never satisfied with it and always want some more - until the day they turn 50, look back and find nothing but an empty path. Do I want to, when I wake up one day, be like that? Definitely not. If I allow myself one more day of those privileges, I will do it everyday until forever. Probably that was what "the thought" warned me about.

There are changes that can easily be made in a blink of an eye, but also those that need some time, huge motivation and tremendous efforts to bend their shape. We're all bound to face both, but some are not quite prepared or when they are, it might be a bit too late.

I got off the bus with all these messy thoughts dancing noisily inside my head, challenging me to put them into order and start analysing them one by one. This can be classified as the second type of change. And that leads me to why I am here, (re)thinking, contemplating and writing, trying my best to lay the foundation of what I want to build in the coming years so that when approaching the next milestone I can look back, smile and be proud.