I Am No Longer a Boy

I am in Iceland this week, surrounded by this landscape that seems to understand transformation.

Glaciers become rivers. Mountains rise from fire. Waterfalls release what they can no longer hold. Nothing here apologizes for changing. Nothing clings to what it once was.

Iceland has been the landscape for me over the last several months that has allowed my personal growth to transpire. I have been lucky to be here several times over the past year and somewhere in the stillness of this place, I realized something on this trip:

I am no longer a boy. I am a man. I know that sounds wild because I am 39, I simply mean energetically. 

This is not about defining what makes someone a boy or a man. It is not about age, strength, responsibility, or meeting someone else’s expectations. It is about recognizing that this really big chapter of my life has ended and allowing myself to enter the chapter that is already here.

There are parts of the boy I was that I deeply appreciate. His curiosity. His hope. His desire to be loved. His willingness to dream without knowing how everything would work out. He helped me survive, explore, create, and become. I am the man I am today because of the boy I was. That is the keyword, WAS. I was the boy, I am no longer the boy. 

I do not need to reject him to grow beyond him.

We sometimes believe moving forward requires us to criticize where we have been. We convince ourselves that accepting the present means the past was wrong, wasted, or no longer valuable.

However, honoring what was and accepting what is can exist together.

I can appreciate who I was without needing to remain that person.

I can be grateful for what I had without trying to recreate it.

I can love the memories without asking them to become my future.

I can acknowledge that something mattered deeply and still allow it to end.

Letting go does not erase the past. It gives the past its proper place.

The people we have loved, the lives we have lived, and the versions of ourselves we have known remain part of us. They shaped our hearts, expanded our understanding, and carried us to this moment. We do not dishonor them by continuing forward.

We honor them by living fully with everything they taught us.

Standing here in Iceland, I feel the difference between remembering the past and living inside it. One allows me to carry wisdom forward. The other prevents me from receiving what is here now.

And there is so much here now.

There is strength I did not have before. There is awareness that could only come through experience. There is this deeper relationship with myself. There is this life asking to be lived, not someday, but today.

Perhaps growing is not about becoming someone entirely new. Perhaps it is about releasing our attachment to who we used to be so we can finally meet who we already are.

I can honor the boy.

I can appreciate everything he experienced, everything he loved, and everything he wanted.

And I can let him rest.

I can still bring parts of him with me, in the evolved version that allows me to match who I am today. 

I am not losing him. I am carrying forward the best of him while releasing the parts that no longer belong in this season.

I am no longer a boy.

I am a man.

Not because I have everything figured out, but because I am willing to accept what is. I am willing to stand in the present without demanding that it resemble the past. I am willing to appreciate what I had while opening my heart to what I have.

What was deserves gratitude.

What is deserves my presence.

And who I am becoming deserves my permission.

Give yourself permission to be… YOU!