The One Thing You Need to Do Before Turning 25

Okay, first off, you know you don’t “need” to do anything, and that’s kind of the point of this little article. 

Take it from me, someone who’s been 25 for all of 1.5 months and is therefore all-knowing: the ONE thing you should do before turning 25 is — drumroll, please — to stop making lists of things to do before turning 25. Or any age, for that matter. 

So ironic, right?!?!?!?! Right, guys?!

Goals are great; v. important. But as I’ve discovered recently, they have a yin-and-yang relationship with reality. Our lives are intertwined in a dance with time and circumstance — a dance that’s un-choreographed, uncensored and unpredictable. From time to time, the dance floor changes; the tempo shifts; the melody is re-written. Dance partners come and go. We stumble and trod on our own feet. Things change, and so do we. And this is why it’s important to make goals, but not to let them form a cage around you. No one can dance like that.

When you’re a compulsive list-maker like me, those “to-dos” you aim to scratch out every day (every season, every year) can cause more harm than good, distracting from the one thing you really should be doing: living. Swaying with circumstance. Rocking your mistakes. Embracing unforeseen situations and finding ways of making them your own. So if you have a bucket list of things to do before you turn 25, that’s great, but don’t tattoo it on your heart or anything, because life might have some different crazy, beautiful things in store for you. 

The types of goals I’m truly referring to here are the big ones — buying a house, maybe. Having a stable job, or an actual savings account with more than $60 in it. Because let’s face it, kids, those goals aren’t as realistic for Millennials as we thought they’d be back when we were 10. The economy has rocked that dance floor and thrown us into a reality that many of us didn’t expect for ourselves at this age.

And that's okay! The definition of "adulthood" is changing. It no longer means having a white-picket-fence lifestyle by the time you're a certain age; it means having the intuition, strength and confidence to follow life's lead and trust that even though you might not be familiar with the steps it's throwing at you, you can and will make it work. 

Dreams don't have an expiration date. If you yearn for something, you'll make it happen. But if you're coming up on your goal year and, oh, look at that, you're still not surrounded by a white picket fence — whatever, man. Clearly there were always supposed to be some chapters in between now and then, so enjoy whatever swing dance, two-step or cha cha life has tugged you into. Because as cliché as it sounds, it's all meant to be. This is you, right now, at (almost) 25. And as nice as those concrete plans can be, nothing's as fun as giving life the wiggle room to really strut its stuff. 

xxx