Triginta – Welcome to 30

The main function of the mind is to dream, we are always dreaming. Always. Sometimes with the brain awake, other times, with the brain asleep. My life has been a dream, one wrought with the inevitability of time and filled with stories. Like Dostoevsky said, how could you live and have no story to tell? What’s the point of being alive if you don’t have a story? Well, I have stories for days.

Today, I turn 30 on the 30th of August. What a day. This is the day the Lord has made and it has finally come. For most of my life, my age has been a mystery, so many people have always thought me older than my age and feigned shocked when they heard my true age. How did you get to do all these things at such a young age? They’d always ask.

But this feels like the right time to finally hit 30, it couldn’t have come at a better time or period for me. The right time, God’s time. The thing with birthdays is that while they portend magic, they are like every other day. Instead of a new dawn, they are really just a mixture of all the years you have lived on earth rolled into one and that’s what 30 feels like. A fusion of the travails of 29, the joys of 24, the tears of 1, the sorrows of 5, the elation of 20, the inquisition of 17, the freedom of 18. All of them rolled into one.

I came into 29 in a very bad state, matter of fact, I was in the air for more than 16 hours on my 29th, and it felt very significant that I was transiting on my 29th through three continents. I did not think too much of it at the time but looking back now, I now know it was reminiscent of the transition my life was undergoing as I hit 30. God set everything right to ensure I arrived 30 the way he wanted and needed me – fresh, renewed and uplifted. I have lived quite the life and experienced so many things way before 30. This year, my soundtrack is Eze Ebube by Neon Adejo. The line in the song that captured most of my motions; for the days when I was at an all-time low, was “…I’m so sure that this is not the end”. This was the electric jolt I needed to keep believing. That’s really the word – belief. Just keep believing because that’s all that’s yours and uncontaminated. Your belief is the one thing no one can take from you and you have to guard it.

It feels like life is just starting anew for me. I made money and lost money, experienced love and heartbreak, there’s no place in the world I want to go to that I either haven’t been to yet or cannot go to, there’s barely anything I need that I cannot afford, there are so many lives that depend on me, I have created things and built things. My life has been scripted and only God could have written such a script all before 30.

It is so funny to think that this life could have ended way before it began. I was not meant to be here. I was a breakthrough that needed to be shut, a light that needed to be dimmed, but God agreed with heaven to make sure I came here, and now I know why. They failed, God wins, as he always does. There’s so much he has invested in me for the world and with this new lease of life that he has given me, I can’t wait. I am convinced that there is even more to come from this life, I am eager to see it all unfold.

It was Sam Altman who said “the days are long but the decades are short”.  The thing with 30 is that some days, I feel like I am old but when I count it as three decades and a whopping ten years before 40, the possibilities are endless. I am in such a good place, happy and without fear. Courageous and bold. What is the worst that can happen? I leave you with this Richard Wright classic, it was my story. I carried myself and my flowers to other climates curious to see if they would bloom and they sure did. All I had was a dream, all I have now is still a dream, I continue to live out the dreams of yesterday while nurturing new ones for tomorrow.

“I was leaving the South
To fling myself into the unknown.…
I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil,
To see if it could grow differently,
If it could drink of new and cool rains,
Bend in strange winds,
Respond to the warmth of other suns
And, perhaps, to bloom.

— Richard Wright”

Happy Birthday Miracle Ihemrochi Onyebuchim.