Decades: Growing Through Our Twenties (The opening lines...)

From the moment I shared that I was writing a book, a flood of people have reached out asking what I've been working on. I've tried to encapsulate what it is in a few words, which has proven to be impossible. How do you condense 50,000 words of thoughts into three sentences?

That being said, I wanted to share the opening lines (as they're written today), to give a taste of what's to come.

That's all - enjoy.

There is an irony in the timing of my writing these first lines.

Currently, I’m 30,000 feet above the ground and on my way to Idaho for my wedding. I’m 29 years old, with only a few months left until I’m 30. My fiancé and I just bought our first home, to which she’ll move into when we arrive back from our wedding. I’m finally plugging away at a job I enjoy, with a role that matches my strengths and provides an opportunity for me to stretch myself in new ways. I have a strong group of friends, that is growing every day with the addition of my fiancé into my life. I’m lucky to have a loving set of parents, a best friend of a brother, and a (soon to be) mother-in-law that I enjoy spending time with. And on top of it all, I’ve cultivated interests and ideals of my own that help guide me day to day.

I mention all of this, not as a boastful beginning to this book, but as a recognition that the beginning of my twenties didn’t look like this. All of it was simply a faint dream and an inkling of a thought. I think it strikes at the heart of what I’m hoping to convey within the chapters of this book – the strife and struggle throughout this decade of our lives, that culminates into the adults we become.

Love

Family

Friends

Career

Self

These 5-Pillars are at the core of who we are. From them springs a set of interconnected priorities that create tension and structure to our lives. Structure that leads us to achieving our life’s goals. Structure that enables us to fulfill our commitments and serve others. Structure that nudges us in the right direction when we stray. Structure that makes room for the joys of life.

Yet, much like any structure, when we start to stand these pillars up, they struggle to stand on their own. By themselves, they can be pushed, pulled, and pried in any direction – tilted and turned based upon the slightest of externality. Without anything connecting them together, they will tumble to the ground, and we’ll spend all our time sprinting from one pillar to the next, bracing it from outside forces. But once each pillar is tied into the next, they begin to hold each other up, and allow you to start building for everything else that you want to fit within their walls. And, as I reflect back upon my twenties, this is the story I remember.

A stumbling attempt to keep it all together. A tumultuous journey of highs and lows, where I thought it all stood up, only to have it come falling down like a house of cards. An emotional roller coaster of hurt, loneliness, sadness, anger, fear, shame, guilt, and gladness, all woven together alongside my successes and failures throughout the last 10 years. That’s your twenties. It's:

Love and Heartbreak

Trust and Betrayal

Commitment and Infidelity

Fellowship and Individuality

Confidence and Arrogance

Sensitive and Callous

Passion and Apathy

The one thing it’s unequivocally not, is easy.

Which is why I’ve felt inspired to write this book. There is an intrinsic element of this time of our lives, that insists on complexity and difficulty, all with a sprinkling of chaos. And from this crucible of stress and struggle comes a form of resolve that we’re able to carry through our lives. In many ways, this is the moral of the story in this decade – “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” Romans 5:3.

There is a natural inescapable-ness to this phenomenon. As a Christian (a result of my twenties), I’ve come to believe that God has designed our lives to be this way. That through commitment to our ideals, we find real freedom within our lives, and that it’s through our struggle that we’re able to grapple with this truth. But this isn’t a phenomenon that you have to be Christian to comprehend. As the old saying goes, “nothing worth a damn in life is free.” The sentiment of earning something is where true value comes from.

Deep down at its core, that’s what your twenties is all about – earning it. Time, effort, energy, blood, sweat, and tears, all of this goes into this decade so we can have the beginnings of a framework for how we want the rest of our life to look. It’s not about figuring at all out. No, rather, it’s simply about standing up your 5-Pillars and getting the walls roughed in for everything else to come.

If your goal is to wade through the struggle of these years, then hopefully this book will offer a helping hand to your project. My intention with these words, is not to provide a “one-size fits all” approach to life, that tells you if you just follow my Five-Steps to Surviving your Twenties, everything will work itself out. Instead, it’s going to be reflective dialogue of the lessons I’ve learned – a stumbling narrative that works its way towards where I am today, a normal guy on the other side of his twenties. I’ll do my best to format it in a way that breaks down each leg of the journey, with an unadulterated version of everything that has happened.

If this sounds cliché, it’s because in a sense it is – but life is a bit cliché.

If these words stirred something inside of you, it's my hope that you'll follow along.

If they sound like something you've heard a friend or a family member struggle through, it's my hope that you'll share this journey with them so that they can follow along.

If you are just simply curious about my story, it's my hope that you'll follow along.

You can do so here at bkarrbooks.com