thirty

So a lot of people write about things they'd like to accomplish before turning thirty, and I love reading about what people choose and what they do. In the immediate years preceding my turning thirty, I focused mainly on maintaining some semblance of a life, so my goals were not more ambitious than eating and sleeping normally when at all possible. I didn't even think about making a bucket list, and after my birthday passed I regretted this a little bit. But on my birthday, which was an amazing and perfect day of nature, adventure and food that I hope to write about soon, M reminded me of how much experience I've been lucky to have in my thirty years even without predefined thirty-before-thirty goals. Here are the thirty things I am most grateful for in my thirty years--some are concrete experiences, but most reflect what these experiences have broadly given me:

1. Taking five cross-country drives and seeing completely different parts of the country in completely different ways

2. Growing up with four older brothers and being cherished and nurtured

3. Spending my twenties on the east coast and exploring every state in New England

4. Falling in love at different periods of my life, and being with M during a time when I can absorb, become better and stronger from his presence and care, and try to offer him the same.

5. Living in our Chapel Street apartment in New Haven and being a second home and haven, late night kitchen, spare couch and bed, hosts of potlucks and parties, for our friends and classmates

6. Being Vietnamese and having parents with lives remote from mine and an intangible history to draw upon

7. The lifelong opportunities value the wonders of language and thought processes through reading books, and writing, from this blog and what it's intermittently recorded, to long email exchanges, to journaling, to essays

8. The hard and beautiful hikes that time, health, companions and resources have enabled me to do: Mount Washington, Kilimanjaro, the Lost Coast

9. Mark teaching me to bike and swim, and discovering childhood pleasures and mistakes as an adult

10. Having clinic at San Francisco General where an afternoon of patients transports me to a dozen different realities

11. Discovering the pleasure in composing a photograph, having a versatile camera, and sharing images

12. Experiencing music in that way where it sinks into you and doesn't leave, with people who feel it too, when seeing live Damien Rice, Iron & Wine, and the National

13. Being exposed to a wide range of foods and feeling the immediate nuanced pleasures of an indulgent meal, the warmth of meals cooked together, and the daily regular effects of a healthy diet

14. Knowing so many people whose kindness, rawness, openness, flaws, and thought continue to amaze me after years of knowing them, and being so lucky to have their lives fit mine

15. Reading Haruki Murakami, and how much that can mean

16. Completing p90x and realizing how good it can feel to be strong and how that can change so much about your life

17. Camping and the feelings of how living minimally is living fully

18. Going to medical school in a place that gave me the time and space to reflect and grow

19. Living in San Francisco for residency

20. Rock climbing and the strength, pure pleasure, and ambition the activity provides; and the perspectives that it offers, from sprawling views of Durango Colorado to falling from rocks to sandy shores along the California Coast

21. Many, many trips to NYC, where every time feels like an amazing vacation because of the many close friends and because I always experience something different from the time before, from day trips to week long ventures

22. Going on spring breaks with groups (Las Vegas and Puerto Rico) where the combination of freedom, carefreeness, and warmth lend closeness and openness

23. Witnessing so many definitive moments in other people's lives: birth, surgery, illness, death

24. Being able to speak at length with people at the end of their lives, and hear what it was feels like to have your physicality slip from you, and hearing from those people who much it means to share this

25. The disinhibition, laughter and warmth that comes with being altered with those closest to you

26. The pain of choices, choices that though are objectively poor ones, are also the most defining, deeply felt and sincere. This of course refers to romance and all its forms.

27. Being thin, tan, and healthy, and the ability to feel comfortable and capable in this body

28. Having flaws that are real flaws, not just the kind that can be positive, that present continual challenges and a reminder that every honest self-narrative is a spectrum of qualities, desires and limitations

29. Being humbled by Harvard and learning what it means to go there and also what it doesn't mean

30. Living life with M, linked in all ways from daily routine to adventuring, and discovering how much is heightened when shared.