I graduated high school in 2000, so this year marks the end of the first decade of my adult life.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the things I accomplished in those ten years. I made a lot of mistakes, but overall, I’m pretty happy with the way things turned out. Things that filled those ten years:
Wrote seven books
Earned two degrees
Became mentally and emotionally healthy
Made a lifetime’s worth of amazing friends
Married my best friend
Of course, I fell seven times doing most of those things. (#3 especially was the cause of much falling.) But I stood up that eighth time, and that’s what counts, I think. It was all a tremendous amount of work, but worth every bit of it. Each of these things has been quite a blessing, and a miracle.
What’s interesting is that everything on that list is something that I knew I wanted by the end of that first year on my own. Which makes me think about the things I want for the next ten years of my life. The list goes something like this:
Several published novels doing well enough
Kids
A house
A 12-year-successful happy marriage
A 12-year-successful profitable business
That seems like a lot. If I got all of that in the next ten years, I don’t know what I’d work for in the 20’s.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.
