Birthday bliss: cheers to a new decade!

This blog is maybe even more for me than it is for you. Taking up space ;). I turned 30 on the 26th of March, wiehoe! A new decade. I loved my twenties, so I wrote myself a letter to remember. I hope it makes you smile and makes you relive your own twenties.

Dear Sammy,

This letter is for you, to remember a new milestone in your life. Your roaring twenties have come to an end and a new era has opened. A new level has been unlocked. Congrats, you turned 30! And I couldn’t help but wonder, what does this mean to you? If you read this letter to yourself on your 40th birthday, what is it that you want to remember?

Let's start off with the fact that I am incredibly grateful for where I am today. I am healthy, and my loved ones are too. I have a home with a view of the Maas - connecting my past and my present - and a dazzling view at night. I live together with the love of my life, and we pet sit the sweetest dog twice a week. I’m just discovering the world of entrepreneurship. I have two partners from whom I can learn and laugh with. I have the best group of friends and family who are there during the good and the ugly. And I now know that I only wear a bra when I wánt to. God, who invented those horrible harnesses with iron sticking into your breasts?

Damn, my twenties were pretty awesome. *Takes a moment to appreciate *. When I was 18, I left Maastricht to study in Rotterdam. I made new friends for life, or at least for a decade. Let's keep the facts straight ;). I loved studying, while typing this I am smiling because Sammy you are a little nerd, aren’t you? The biggest gift my studies gave me was the understanding of perception. That we all live within our own reality and that to connect with one another we need to understand each other's perception and be aware of the context we receive information in. Although my vocabulary now to express this has been updated compared to my early twenties. The lesson I learned after I finished studying, was to slow down. I just turned 22 when I left the university with my master's degree, “so Hun, in your next life take your time”. I connected, I partied, I studied, I experimented; I experienced life to the fullest. I also fell in love with traveling. I traveled to many parts of the world. From studying abroad in Australia, to discovering Myanmar with my best friend and from conquering mountains in South America to biking solo through Europe. Woehoe please could I relive this again?

Yet there were also many lessons. I dealt with loss, uncertainty, pain, transformation, and its effect on relationships. I grew apart from some friends and strengthened my bonds with others. In my early twenties, I felt disillusioned by what becoming an adult means. After all I learned at uni, this was what work really was like? What spiraled into; is this what life is really like? I turned dark before I could lighten up again.

Back then, I didn’t understand how I could take ownership of my time and energy. Maybe that is one of the most useful lessons I’ve learned over the past years, with ups and downs in different jobs, organisations, training, help, and experiences. I delved deep into my own patterns during my management traineeship at ORMIT, and learned more about myself in the professional context. I went from ceremonies in the Amazon, to 10 days in silence and from challenging my own world views in the challenge club to becoming a certified yoga teacher. I think one of the constants in my twenties was personal development. I fell in love with it, I might have fallen in love with myself too in the process! Not idealizing myself, but looking at myself through softer eyes. You’re also only human after all, Sammy. When I stopped my traineeship, my manager, personal development manager told me, "After this, you might be done with delving into yourself for a bit." But I wasn’t, I continued and I hope I will do so in the next 10 years, because there is so much more to discover!

So what has changed in the past 10 years? I think I can say I became a bit less restless. Despite the fact that I still have more ideas than I could ever follow up with. However, I believe I’m more at ease with that. Which is not only a comfort to me, but maybe even more to Sebas. I learned that it is about quality and not quantity and I discovered the importance of choosing. I only have so much energy to give every day.

In these last years, I am growing by doing. I always had many ideas and I could over-analyze them and they would stop me from moving forwards (and in all honesty they sometimes still do). Yet, my biggest transformations are the result of doing and experiencing not from theorising them. Yes, this is often scary, but you can make the steps towards it smaller. Not working? Make them smaller again, so they will start moving you. Because when these small steps result in movement, oh, you’re ready for the ride. You’ve been and always will.

My newest topic of discovery is love. I learned that I want to work and live with the power of love. I’m looking into different faces of love. Or maybe I should say I am more and more understanding that love is this enormous white beam of light. I believe to comprehend this, we as humans “put a lot of faces” on love. We tried to categorise it and often use it in the context of close relationships. However, for me, it’s becoming more and more obvious that it’s the source of life, the source of creation. It’s funny, because I still find it scary to write about this because what will other people think about this, is it too abstract, too naive, too weird? But hey, I'm 30 now. Time to step up the game and to level up.

Lots of love,

Yours truly,

Sammy