When I turned 30, a friend gave me a birthday card in which she wrote: "Welcome to this most excellent club!" This card made me feel that perhaps turning 30 wasn't such a bad thing after all, and gave me hope that good things might happen in the future. Most of the friends who surrounded me that day five years ago were (and obviously still are) older than me. At least outwardly, they had their lives together. I was still just a scattered young thing: Unhappy in my job, searching for meaning in my life, and trying to find my place in the universe. I felt adrift — disconnected on an elemental level from the world and the people around me.

A lot of things have changed since I passed the 30-year milestone. This third decade of my life is now half lived (as of 3/14) and, as usual, I feel compelled to write about the passage of time, to reflect upon the state of my life, to congratulate myself on the things I've changed, and to contemplate the areas on which I still need to work. The past five years have brought an array of changes into my life and outlook.

The good thing about getting older is that you usually get better. (All those fashion magazines targeted to teens and 20-somethings be damned.) The folks I work with here at Tripod have no idea from whence I came. I lived a whole other life before I landed in Billsville. I've only been here for a few months, and already I'm developing a reputation as the chick who brings in a healthy lunch every day, the promoter and dispenser of miracle flu-fighting Wellness Formula, and the "running girl." That's right — girl. (I feel very strongly about being identified as a chick or a girl.) When I was 24, my knees ached and I smoked about two packs of cigarettes a day. I quit for good in 1990. It took several tries. After that, I started to get serious about cleaning up my diet.

Obvious physical changes came in my early 30s when I joined a gym. (For real, I mean — I actually went three or four times a week, lifted weights, took classes, used the stair climber, and so on.) Then a friend suggested I take up running, and set me up with a training schedule. The following spring, I ran my first race, a 10k, and I actually did pretty well. From that moment, I was hooked. As I ran away from the vices of my 20s my body changed in amazing ways, and not just visibly. In the middle of my first racing season, I ran Matty's Run in Pittsfield: A rocky, root-ridden, over-the-hill-and-through-the-corn-fields sort of course, with several streams thrown in for good measure. I had run the course a few summers earlier with another friend. At that time I wasn't a runner and it had been torture. I hadn't been able to make it up the big rocky hill in the middle. But in the race, I bounded straight to the top, passing several other runners. I was barely winded. "Wow!" I said out loud. "All those squats and lunges really paid off!"

More recently, I've rounded out my running with Yoga classes. (Though I must admit, I only started Yoga so I could impress people at parties with physical feats like headstands and standing half-lotuses, which I had never been able to do before, even as a child.) There was an unexpected benefit to my contortionist's aspirations. At the end of our tortuous balancing, stretching, and twisting sessions, we'd practice either guided meditation or Buddhist chanting. All 30 of us in the room would chant, "Om" as if we were high on a Tibetan plateau. It was both humbling and awe-inspiring.

I really got into chanting. I do it at home now too, seated cross-legged on the living-room floor, issuing forth "Oms" as if in a trance. They sound high and unnatural, even disquieting, in the beginning. After a time though, they start to become as natural as breathing. It's a sound that grows deep and even as my body resonates in frequency. I feel it issuing forth from the center of my being.

My long search for what I have always referred to as "that something missing" has also been partially revealed to me in this decade. I'd cut myself off from Christianity sometime around the age of 16. In the years since, I leaned toward atheism, agnosticism, and, for a while, a religion I made up for myself comprised of a heady mix of Native American, Pagan, and Wiccan philosophies. Finally, a Buddhist friend encouraged me to read the Dalai Lama.

Since then, I feel changes in my life by the minute. The changes now are mostly inward, though they do have outward manifestations. Where once my goals were all about my own happiness and success in life, they are becoming more compassionate and harmonious. I have learned, with some humility, that I'm not all that different than the next person, and that we all want the same things. We all want to be happy.

However, the most important thing that has changed for me is the understanding of the source of that happiness. What I've learned in these last five years is that happiness is not "out there." Happiness, or any emotion, for that matter, is not in the best job, the nicest house, the fastest race, or in the things that other people do or don't do for me. No person or thing can bestow true happiness upon a person. It is not in a compliment, a slight, or a winning Powerball ticket. It is in the individual. It is in you. It is in me.

My journey so far has led me to push my body, transform it, and to finally feel connected to it in an essential way, through running and Yoga. In my meditation and study of Buddhist doctrine, I've seen and felt the connections between us all, and I've felt the reemergence of my soul.

And that has been the best part, so far, of this most excellent decade.

Om.
Susan Slattery