Today I turned 30. If you live long enough I suppose that’s the sort of thing that happens to you. It’s the sort of milestone birthday that makes you do a fair mix of looking back and looking forward, and whilst I’ve found the former less than instructive, the latter has been largely positive. The largest change in my life in the last couple of years–leaving employment in London to read for my MA–was prompted largely by the knowledge that I would feel better about myself if, when I turned 30, I was walking a path which I had chosen and which led towards what I wanted for myself. I’m happy to say that seems to be the case; I can safely say that on my 30th birthday I have a better sense of direction than I had ten years ago.

I’ve been thinking about the transition from 20s to 30s for a little while. Enough so that it rendered New Year something of a non-event. Usually I’ll at least make a token resolution or two (and usually stick to them), but this year the prospect of entering a new decade in a few weeks seemed like the bigger deal. So, I sort of made a resolution for that: to pay more attention to, and become more invested in, things which have held interest for me for some time, but which I haven’t made effort to explore as fully as I might.

So, what are these mysterious interests which I’ve long held secret? Well, there are three main ones which come to mind, and which I intend to spend a bit more time with in my 30s.

1. Chess

1.e4 c5 2.Bc4 d5 3.exd5 g5 4.b3 Qa5 5.Bb2 Qb4 6.Bxh8 b5 7.a3 bxc4 8.axb4 cxb3 9.cxb3 cxb4 1-0

I’ve played chess for a while. I remember as a child having a Kasparov electronic board to play against which wouldn’t read your moves unless you really pushed the pieces down on the squares. I remember playing against my dad in a caravan somewhere when we were on holiday. I’ve owned chess strategy books; Walter Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit is one of my favourite guilty-pleasure novels; I regularly at least scan-read the chess column in The Guardian, and for a while I played a decent amount of chess in Yahoo Games. I’m not sure what made me stop playing as much, and it’s not that I made a conscious decision to do so, I just kind of dropped off.

But not completely: there’s a folder on my iPod specifically for chess apps, and it contains several which I’ve picked up for free or cheap over the last couple of years to test what’s out there. If you’re looking for recommendations Chess With Friends can’t be bettered for playing against other people, and iChess is an inexpensive, slick app that provides a good A.I. challenge. In a spell of taking things a bit more seriously last year I picked up a really good desktop chess program called Shredder 12 and it has sat in my Applications folder, criminally underused ever since.

Shredder is the kernel of my hoped for chess resurgence. Although I’m not thinking of things in terms of making sure I play x number of games per week, I do intend to make Shredder a bit more of a go-to when I’m sat with the laptop in the evening, or when I need a break from writing or research. Instead of opening Twitteriffic or Reeder automatically, or keying ‘j’ through page after page of Ffffound, and surfing random Tumblrs, I’ll play a game, or even just a few moves, against Shredder. That will go a long way to fulfilling the modest goal of just being more frequently involved in the practice of chess.

Plus it’s rewarding! There’s not much difference in how it feels to A+ that next tricky Super Meat Boy level, and how it feels to make Shredder resign in nine moves (see above).

2. Typography

This is a relatively new interest, but one born out of two long-held passions: the written word, and clean design. When, in 2005, The Guardian had a design overhaul, I became acutely aware of how much my reading experience was improved by the Berliner format and the Guardian Egyptian typeface. In the months that followed I would often catch myself not reading a story at all but just looking at the type on the page, examining its features and its spacing, trying to figure out what was so right about it.

Shortly after that I came across Gary Hustwit’s documentary Helvetica, and had my eyes opened to the fact that much of what I had thought of as clean logo design was rooted in a certain Swiss typographic sensibility.

And my interest in typography in general grew from there. Over the last couple of years I’ve added a number of design blogs to my mental list of weekly visits, and have been led by them into the fascinating world of type design. But I’m still very much a novice, and could do with some schooling in the history of the art, and immersion in the current state of it.

Whether it’s a case of hitting the libraries, or listening to podcasts like Typeradio and reading magazines such as 8 Faces, I’m hoping that I can grow my understanding of type – at the very least it should make my world a bit prettier.

3. Zazen

Despite an interest in Buddhist thought which dates back to my teens, I would feel disingenuous identifying myself as a practicing Buddhist, and of late even the small practice which I had cultivated in my early 20s hasn’t been part of my life for some time.

To me Buddhism has always seemed more like a system of values and ideas than a religion, and right from my first encounters with it, I felt that it made a lot of sense to me. I’ve owned a copy of Kulananda’s Western Buddhism for maybe 15 years, and have read the first half perhaps as many as a half-dozen times. The rest of my Buddhism library is comprised of a book titled Teach Yourself Buddhism (again, the first half has a bunch of notes written in the margins) and a pair of books by Brad Warner: Hardcore Zen, and the excellently titled Sit Down and Shut Up. Warner’s books in particular are very approachable; he writes amusingly and instructively, with a great deal of knowledge, about subjects such as the teachings of Dogen and the centrality of sitting zazen to his personal practice.

For a couple of years I practiced simple breathing exercise-led meditation on a more or less daily basis. I’d picked up a technique from somewhere, maybe the Kulananda book, and felt like just the act of sitting for 30 or 40 minutes was doing me some good. In time, perhaps because it wasn’t rooted in any kind of larger practice, it sort of ran its course.

When I moved down south in 2008, I made a friend who was far more dedicated in her practice than I had ever been. As well as meditation she was also big into chanting, and had a daily yoga regime that would just about kill me. The way she spoke about the part Buddhism plays in her life made me miss my little routine, and made me want to reinvestigate zazen, perhaps re-read Warner… who knows, maybe even finish one of those other books!

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Taking up my MA has represented a re-dedication to my passion for literature, and it seems like a good idea to try and apply something like that kind of focus to some other areas of my life. The hope is that more time spent on things that interest me will only make me happier in decade #4.