AT TWENTY; NEW MILESTONES

You can only be twenty once. Just like being ten. There’s just twenty. Simple and straight to the point. The beautiful thing about being twenty is that for once in seven years you do not have to lug the clichéd ‘teen’ behind your age. It makes you feel grown. It’s a burning of bridges of sorts. Letting go of ‘teenage things’.

For me, birthdays and age additions have always meant more than the wishes or the goodwill, or the usual hullabaloo of a birthday. I have always used such times to assess my journey 365 years ago; how far I have come and how far I am willing to go. It is at these times that I look back at what, at who, I have become since the same day the previous year. For me, it is a time to set new milestones, erect new frontiers.

Twenty should not just happen to anyone. Even if the whole of life has been happening to you, not twenty. They say a fool at forty is a fool for life. Forty’s too far. For me, a fool at twenty is a fool for life. Twenty’s the first time you can take your life into your hands without being cuddled. It is when you can make mistakes without excuses being made for you. One year to six, they said ‘Oh, he’s still a child. Leave him. He doesn’t know anything.’ Seven to twelve, they said ‘He’s a growing boy, what do they know other than how to eat?’ Thirteen to nineteen ‘Teenagers, that’s how they behave. Leave them’

Twenty.

There’s no excuse for you. Not anymore. Even you can’t make one for yourself. No, not at twenty. Twenty is where life starts. It’s a score of your life. A score means you’re even. You’ve settled your score with life. You’re on your own.

Which is why twenty got me thinking more than my other birthdays. Twenty is just 365 days and like that, I’ll be twenty-one. ‘Don’t just wake up one morning and realise you’re forty’ I tell myself. ‘Let every conscious step be one in the direction of realising your true self.’

My true self being the man in the picture that I am not, yet.

I wish I knew more about this twenty before I got here. It’s like arriving at a party only to realise you’re underdressed. I feel underdressed. But maybe I should get new clothes. ‘Twenty’ clothes.

It’s being twenty three times that makes you sixty, and being sixty once is enough to spell you old. By the time I’m doing this a third time, if Christ so tarries, I want to look back and see each of the twenty years, a robust score. I want to know I gave Life a run for her money.

So I tell myself, what are those things that have weakened you, incapacitated you from being the man in the picture you see? And then I begin to pick them out one by one and throw them away, backwards, into nineteen. Just like Paul, who says ‘When I was a child, I thought like a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ Flimsy things. It was time for me to put them away. Those teenage toys. Life had come face to face with me, and she wasn’t putting on Prada.

She was hooded. And I couldn’t see her face.

And so here I am, my small self. A young man faced with a large slice of life ahead of him. Like bread. There is only one way I can do this, and do it well.

I must forge new pathways.

There are too many people on earth, too many thinking alike. There is always the danger of oblivion for each of them. I do not want that. I do not want life to swallow me. I do not want to be number one million or number forty-five million; some dude in a headcount. I want to be me. Inimitable. Unimitating.

I want to forge new pathways.

Where men haven’t trodden. Where dew hasn’t fallen. Where wild things lurk. Where danger is hidden. Where no green tendrils sprout. Where is dark and dreaded. Where is feared. That is where I want to go.

For there, I can stand out. I can be me. I can filter oblivion into oblivion. I can dare to be. I can be more than ‘twenty’.

The old paths always lead to the same place. I do not want to go to the same place. So here is my mantra; my clarion call for twenty.

Twenty is Might. Power. Will. Strength.

Twenty is Determination. Resolve. Quest. Drive

Twenty is Life. Manhood. Me. Made.

The journey begins here. I must forge new pathways.