30, somehow

hey you, nina here. happy sunday.

i just turned 30 this week. level 3, although i keep saying i am just turning 20.

birthdays make you look back whether you want to or not. i have been thinking about the last decade, the people i met, the versions of me that existed at 20, 25 and now 30, and how much changed in between.

most of the people who were in my life at 20 are not in it anymore. the same is true for many of the people who were there at 25. i have changed a lot too. fundamentally, in some ways. and still, there are parts of me that feel exactly the same.

if you were ever part of my life, even briefly, thank you. every person leaves something behind. a lesson, a memory, a new way of thinking, a scar, a story, sometimes all of the above. all of it shaped me.

this birthday i decided to be slightly less of a hermit and spent the day with my mom and my sister. nothing spectacular. we were simply together, and it was lovely.

i am also very aware that i am not exactly where some younger version of me thought i would be by 30. i think we all have these imaginary timelines in our heads. who we will be with, where we will live, what we will have figured out by a certain age.

but i feel grateful for my life as it actually is. not because everything is perfect, and not because i have stopped wanting things, but because i no longer want to treat an old prediction as the standard my life has to meet.

i think what i want for this next year is more surrender. not giving up, just accepting that life will keep changing me and changing around me. i cannot plan every person, every place, every ending or every beginning.

i can only meet whatever comes next with an open heart

curations of the week

watched

Lessons in Chemistry

i asked ChatGPT to recommend a show based on what it knows about me. it picked this one and, annoyingly, it was right. i am loving it.

listened

a meditation i loved this week

i tried this meditation on YouTube this week and really liked the experience. highly recommend if you want something simple to put on and actually do.

gifted myself

Signs by Laura Lynne Jackson

my birthday gift to myself. i have been curious about intuition, synchronicities and the way we assign meaning to the things that happen around us.

reading

i am still slowly making my way through the three books already on my reading list, but this week i went back to one that has been with me for almost a decade.

Be Here Now by Ram Dass

an old friend gave me this book in 2015, when i was 20. i remember reading parts of it then and knowing there was something important there, while also not really understanding a lot of it. i was simply too young and had not lived enough of the things the book was asking me to look at.

now, at 30, it lands completely differently. i am closer to the age my friend was when he gave it to me, and i have gone through enough of my own internal changes, identity shifts and what i would call my own spiritual awakening that the book feels much more applicable to the life i am actually living.

Ram Dass wrote it after leaving his life as Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert, traveling to India and studying with Neem Karoli Baba. it became one of the books that introduced a huge Western audience to meditation, yoga and Eastern spiritual thought. but the central idea is surprisingly simple: stop confusing everything you think about life with life itself. come back to what is actually here.

we are constantly building stories around the present. memories, identity, expectations, fear, desire, what happened five years ago, what might happen next year. then we start living inside those stories instead of inside the moment that is actually happening.

that is why i love the second part of the reminder so much: remember. because of course we forget. we get absorbed again, start planning imaginary futures, replaying old conversations, comparing ourselves, worrying, wanting. the practice is not never getting lost. it is noticing when you do and coming back.

there is also a lesson in the book that i keep thinking about: painted cakes do not satisfy hunger. you can read endlessly about consciousness, Buddhism, philosophy, psychology or spirituality and still never practice any of it. you can consume hundreds of books and videos and become very good at talking about awareness while living completely unconsciously. at some point, collecting ideas has to turn into actually living them.

building

Pioneras en IA

i started Pioneras en IA, a Latin American community for women who want to understand and use AI without needing a technical background or fluent English. i am starting with free workshops, courses and community, then building the membership from there. very excited about this.

wrote

30 things i learned in my twenties

thirty little things life taught me before i somehow became a 30 year old woman.

a quote i’m pondering

have a good week. see you next sunday.

if you have two minutes, i would still love to hear what you think through my anonymous feedback form.

p.s. buy me a birthday coffee ☕ (kidding)