Just Keep Me Where the Light Is

The night before I turned thirty, I was standing outside a Target in Florida waiting for my family to come out of the store, and somehow that ended up being the place where the whole thing hit me.

There wasn’t anything remarkable about the scene. Just people finishing their errands, carts rattling across the pavement, headlights sliding slowly through the parking lot. The kind of ordinary moment you usually forget ten minutes later.

But the air felt good that evening. After a couple of cloudy days the warmth had finally come back, and for whatever reason I didn’t feel like going inside, so I just stayed there for a minute leaning against the railing and watching people move around.

Florida evenings do something to you. They slow your mind down a little.

And somewhere in the middle of standing there, watching people load groceries into their cars and head home, the thought landed in a way it hadn’t earlier in the day.

Tomorrow I turn thirty.

Of course I knew that already. Birthdays don’t exactly sneak up on you. But standing there that night it landed differently — not as an idea, but as a feeling.

My twenties were over.

And once that thought showed up, it didn’t leave right away. I just stood there with it for a moment.

You only get one decade of your twenties. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. That’s something you know intellectually when you’re younger, but it doesn’t really land in your body until you’re standing at the edge of it.

For a minute there was a kind of strange heaviness that came with that realization. Not regret exactly. More like the awareness of time moving in a way you can’t really argue with.

And naturally the question surfaced not long after that.

Did I miss anything?

When I was twenty-two, I had a picture in my head of what thirty might look like. I think a lot of people do. I thought maybe I’d be in a successful touring band by now, or that some obvious breakthrough would have happened somewhere along the way. I also assumed that by this point certain parts of life might already feel settled.

But as I stood there watching someone push a cart across the parking lot under the lights, another thought started forming that shifted the feeling of the whole moment.

My twenties weren’t wasted.

They were invested.

Sixteen years ago I picked up the cello, and since then a huge part of my life has revolved around trying to understand that instrument. Practice rooms, rehearsals, long stretches of time trying to get a sound in the real world that at first only existed in my imagination.

Some days it felt like progress. Other days it felt like I was just circling the same thing over and over again.

But you stay with it.

And the longer you stay with something, the more it shapes you.

Standing there that night I realized something that surprised me a little when I said it quietly to myself: after sixteen years of playing, I’ve brought my cello playing to an exceptionally high level.

Not because I’m uniquely gifted.

Because I stayed.

Of course staying with something that deeply comes with trade-offs. Depth always costs something. There were places I didn’t go in my twenties, experiences I probably missed because I was doing what I was doing.

That thought crossed my mind for a moment.

But interestingly, it didn’t stick around very long.

Because the more I stood there thinking about those years, the more obvious something else became.

Those years didn’t just build my craft.

They built me.

They gave me a direction.

And along with that realization came another one that I think has been slowly forming in me for a while now. I’ve started to notice how much I absorb the energy of the people around me. If I spend enough time around cynicism, I start to feel that cynicism creeping into my own thinking. And if I spend time around people who are constantly chasing prestige or validation, I can feel that pull in myself too.

For a long time there was this quiet pressure somewhere in the background of my life to prove something — to prove that choosing music seriously wasn’t naïve, to prove that the path I was on had legitimacy.

But standing there that night, something in me felt finished with that.

Not in a dramatic way. More like the feeling you get when a chapter quietly closes without you announcing it.

In a lot of ways, I don’t feel like I’m auditioning anymore.

And interestingly, that realization didn’t make me less ambitious.

If anything, it clarified what the ambition is actually for.

Because the older I get, the more it seems obvious that things like luxury or recognition — as nice as they can be — don’t really hold up as the center of a life by themselves. A car, when you really think about it, is still just a car. And even a stage, as thrilling as it can be in the moment, is still just a stage.

What seems to matter more now is the life that surrounds those things.

Standing there that evening I could feel something shifting inside me that I hadn’t quite felt before. The frantic “prove it” energy that drives a lot of your twenties had started to loosen its grip.

Not because the dream got smaller.

But because the dream got clearer.

I realized I don’t want applause in an empty house.

I want whatever I build to be rooted in a real life.

By the time my family came out of the store and we started walking toward the car, the heaviness I had felt earlier had mostly passed. What was underneath it surprised me a little.

Excitement.

Because in about seven months my life will look very different. I’ll be living here in Sarasota,Florida, building the next chapter intentionally — not chasing approval, not trying to prove I belong somewhere, but simply building something from a place that feels aligned.

Looking back now, my twenties don’t feel like something that slipped away.

They feel like the years that shaped me.

There’s a lyric I’ve loved for a long time that says, “I’m half the boy, but I’m twice the man.” It comes from Who Did You Think I Was by the John Mayer Trio, and standing there in that parking lot it suddenly felt less like a lyric and more like a description of where I am.

The boy in me dreamed big.

The man I’m becoming knows what he’s building.

And when I think about the decade ahead, the thought that comes to mind is simple.

Just keep me where the light is.

Because standing there in that Florida parking lot, watching people live their ordinary lives, I realized something that actually made me smile a little.

Real life — the actual thing — is far more interesting than the fantasy version of success I used to imagine.

And somehow that realization didn’t feel sad at all.

It felt like the beginning of something.