Who Will I Become?

Who will I become? The answer to this question depends on my choices.

I stand at the edge of 30 proud of how I’ve grown. I started the decade drunk and confused. Exploding with energy but unsure where to direct it. Now I’m a co-founder, writer, and fluent Chinese speaker. I’m on fire with ideas, filled with vision. Transcendent visions of who I can become, of the impact Write of Passage and Will Learns Chinese can have on the world.

I love grappling with our human condition. I choose to stare the awesome glory and terror of life square in the eyes. I’m not afraid. Give me the full, unvarnished truth. Give me the majesty of art and the abject terror of Nothingness, that unfillable void at the center of subjective existence. 

Death is a glorious tool when wielded well. Death reifies life. It infuses each minute with rich significance. Wander to death’s edge and take a peek — feel the exhilarating gust rip through you. 

We’re going to die. But not tonight! 

Today we live with every ounce of force our biology can muster. Today springs fresh and vivid. This singular jewel rises reliably each morning. From where, we don’t know. For what purpose is ours to decide. We greet the new dawn clear-headed, with waves of fresh vitality coursing through our rivers of blood and air. 

I’m a knot of meaning against an infinite backdrop, a 90-year frame of emotion and significance set against eternity. Behold the borderless blur of Being within you and without you! What’s really there, past our perception? Endless sludge of time and space, forever expanding in all directions. And from this glopping grayness we sculpt our lives, choice by choice. 

I sit here at my desk as more than a man. Just like my heroes — Woolf and Pessoa, Camus and Emerson – I am a conduit to the infinite. Eternity erupts across space and time. Somewhere in this endlessness, slivers of the infinite tangled themselves together into me. Three decades on, my one wet kilogram spins its universes of hopes, fears, visions and voids. Here I now sit, detangling my messy web of self, packaging it into language, and freezing it forever in these humble bits of phrase.