In less than month now, I’ll be 25. This event has always held significance for me. Perhaps because my mother would always tell me that 25 is when my brain would fully develop and I could consider myself a “real” adult or perhaps it’s because 25 felt so far away in my freshman year of college that I created a “25 goals” list to accomplish in that distant future. I joke sometimes that I was a new age hippie before it was mainstream. Way before intentions, manifestations and turmeric lattes, eight year old me was creating lists of things I’d like to accomplish by the end of that year. These lists started out with petty (but monumental at age 8) objectives like “get a playset in the backyard”, “buy “x” items from the Ikea catalog” and slowly evolved into “go to London”, “get into Stanford”, “get the highest grade in honors biology”. The interesting thing about these lists was that even if they didn’t come true in my anticipated timeframe, they almost always happened. Two observations: as college began and reality set in, the goals became vague, pronouncedly less descriptive,”iffy”, more about accomplishing the insurmountable steps on the journey than the objective and more in line with what society would have liked to happen to me rather than what I imagined for myself. And perhaps it was that inauthenticity that prompted my last ever list, “25 goals”, divided into pre- and post-, that I intended to accomplish by that monumental age. These goals encompassed both my hopes and my fears, my intent to do normal things like “graduate with honors BA in English and South Asian Studies”, “take the LSAT once”, and “buy a car” as well as, “spend substantial time in India”, “learn how to use a gun”, “write and publish something” and “do what feels right with dance”. Secondly, many of these goals simply happened, without much fanfare. I expected to graduate with honors and I did. I intended to learn to drive and purchase a car so I did. I mention this because while they seemed to me the logical next step, I hardly ever paused to think about the enormous effort, the everyday doing that surmounted to these possibilities coming into fruition. And that is the thing with intentions, we set them afloat into the ether while they swim in our soul, scribbled on a page but etched in our minds hoping that they will magically come true, forgetting that we hold them deep down inside of us, in their truest form, all along. We are our limitations. I’m learning to let go of my grown up expectations, instead reverting back to my childlike purposefulness and perception of time and its limitations as malleable. I hope to stop instating caveats to save me from potential pitfalls and societally-imposed deadlines. Everything happens in due course, on its own timeline. I’ll have to decide how much effort I’ll put in to manifest my intentions.