turning 25

jan/feb 2025

hiroshima, jan 2025

some research suggests that the sapien prefrontal cortex only really matures around the age of 25.

in other words, to be fully forged as a whole-grown adult, you must live for a quarter of a century.

I have almost managed to attain this wholly unremarkable feat as i turn 25 on jan 21. and while i cannot make claims of cortical maturation, this past year does feel like i am all grown up…

i worked my first real job that paid a salary (thanks dognosis!)

i learned to drive a car in peak bengaluru traffic on the regular and picked and dropped family and friends to the airport

i hit and got hit by multiple vehicles while driving a car. i learned how bangalore police stations work and that the law and justice are fictions, useful fictions but mere stories we collectively agree to believe in nevertheless

i learned that salads are actually great (thanks itamar) and ordered them at restaurants as something to genuinely look forward to

i went from only taking full responsibility for myself to meaningful responsibility for 30 other wonderful beings. this meant i went from someone who often would drop off all comms and head into the woods for his bday without telling anyone to being responsive within 24hrs. I was on the ball 12hrs a day 6 (often 7) days a week, almost every week (9/10)

I used to crumple into a ball when sick but fought off a viral to take investor calls till midnight and then woke at 7 to power wash shit off kennel floors bc our caretaker and trainers all got hit w life and someone had to fucking do it. I remember taking off my shirt and the sun hitting me and feeling like a fucking man as dog shit blasted off the floor

I carried a poor dying rabid street puppy by the name of carbon to the hospital as he whimpered his last. i felt my resolve supernova, birthing steel glittered nebula, molecules of agency coalescing to form something that the llms still lack - a quest of gravity-bending purpose. I made sure all our team and the friendly drone making neighbours got their rabies shots. i learned how a literal zombie virus lives amongst us and takes our best every year in thousand droves. i learned that sometimes there is no one to blame for the world’s evils, that often times evil is simply an inability or an inertia towards inhabiting the throbbing vastness of true empathy. i learned that building bridges, as well as fences, to allow life to more fully, more selflessly, live in this empathic wilderness, is as close to wrestling with god, perhaps even closer, as any kind of cave dwelling retreat or pilgrimical dip in a river.

i realized how truly attuned i felt to my life-purpose. how the protostars of dognosis and soulmates and pratibha poshak weaved together a trajectory that feels too good to be anything but true. that i suddenly no longer could be teenagerly nonchalant about death, that i had faint embers of fear on some flights that i could rationally brush off but nonetheless flickered. that the world teetering on a precipice was no longer an abstraction to chew on casually, that there were real stakes - personal stakes - of wanting to be on the cosmic ride for longer.

i discovered that love is truly ineffable and that it is impenetrable and unplumbable by the discursive intellect. i began to understand what this means, “an understanding that love is not an act of possession but rather one of play. the game? to expand the boundaries of one’s goodness in the face of absolute and unequivocal loss. it’s hopeless, after all. So how far can you go?”.

i didn’t run, cook, write, sit, read, or love as much as i’d liked to. i’m glad i get another go around the sun to do so.

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