The 45th Year

I decided to make a combo post this week. How great when inspiration and beautiful living fully merge?

As I do every year around my birthday, I have been contemplating and reflecting about past, present, and future. I love the cupcakes, gifts, well wishes, balloons, and celebrations just as much as the next person. I also love the opportunity to take stock and inventory of the past year; what it contained, what it taught, what it led me to, and how I conducted myself throughout all the challenges, trials, and triumphs. It’s important to share that some years have been hell, and that this, too, must be reviewed. I have never had a day that was just one thing let alone a year. Each year has been full of countless experiences, causes, conditions, joys, and sorrows that helped bring me towards the next phase of rebirth. Different years have different flavors though, and I feel it’s a healthy practice to honestly take a good look at where I grew, where I flopped, how I learned, how I missed the mark, how I loved, how I shrunk myself, how much I learned, how much I explored, and how I stayed stuck. And that’s just part of the list. 12 months is a long time in which a lot could (and should) happen. To be totally honest, many of my birthdays used to bum me out in certain ways. When I felt no growth, evolution, or changes in routine I’d be full of sadness, disappointment that I was failing myself, and dread that life would look the same every year as I added another candle to the cake. It weighed on me terribly; what’s the point of being alive year after year when nothing seems to be evolving? I didn’t know what I wanted from myself but I knew intuitively that I was meant to live in a much larger way that I had been. Defining my life by dates on the calendar depressed the hell out of me. Birthdays, anniversaries, winter breaks, summer camp dates, etc were these markers of time that somehow moved the years along but not me. From a mother’s perspective, it can be hard to watch our kids growing and changing while we stay stagnant. At least that’s how I felt for many years. The difference is that children obviously naturally grow and develop while adults have to really work at it. When my height capped out at 5 feet 4 inches, my shoe size settled into a 7 1/2, my body size and weight were pretty consistent, and I had long ago finished school, what was left for me to grow into? Where could any other possible evolution come from? Was I 34 years old and done becoming anything other than I was? I gotta tell you, it felt bleak in this way. It’s like I was celebrating being born but not being fully alive. I felt dishonest and I had no idea how to change that. The real kicker was this: when I ran out of birthdays what the hell would be said at my funeral? Life is so precious and is bursting with all sorts of possibilities. I didn’t feel like I was taking advantage of any of then and that hurt my heart. At the time I saw no alternative and resigned myself to this just is how life is. We completely stop growing at the end of adolescence and that’s simply life’s design. I can’t think of a more disempowering sentiment; that I’m a helpless participant in the rhythm of life, meant to be tossed about as I check off dates sporadically on a calendar, skipping over the “non special” weekdays because they didn’t mean much unless marked for something. I didn’t know how to manage myself and so I didn’t know how to manage the mundane, much less how I fit into it all. I totally understand why stay at home mothers often freak out as the kids get older. Who are we aside from that role, and what do we do as the busyness of raising little ones shifts? Cultivating individuality is no joke. It takes time, self interest, self discovery, and honoring natural developmental stages. It takes energy that likely feels unattainable. Knowing who we are and how we want to exist as individuals does not happen by accident. There is no magic pill to take to learn the answers to life’s great question: what am I truly here for? I love the word “existential” and how it’s often paired with “crisis”. It is indeed an important crisis on the individual path to go through. Why was I placed in a human existence and what is my task in this life? I knew my greater purpose far exceeded packing for camp and planning and organizing stuff. I hear this so often from peers and friends, and while the question is a tough one it’s also a crucial one. No answers come without a proceeding question. We need the confusion to bring about clarity.

So what am I clear on as I process the fact that I have been alive for a full 44 years, now beginning a 45th? I’m clear on how I feel more youthful each year as I shed heavy past conditioning and trauma. In the meditation community there’s a joke about a “meditation facial”. I absolutely feel more outer radiance as my inner radiance pierces through and rediscovers its shine. I’m clear that I exist to contribute to the landscape of humanity, and that I need to do serious work on myself in order to do this. My blockages that prevent me from living from a place of existential perspective are my responsibility. I’m clear that if I don’t watch and tend to my breathing then everything I do, think, and say is affected. I’m clear that for me, Buddhism is the greatest medicine I have ever encountered. I wish everyone could taste it. I’m clear about how the most ordinary non calendar highlighted days are fully extraordinary. When I feel the warm sunshine, hear a birdsong, enjoy a delicious meal, feel the shower or breeze on my skin, laugh with my kids, learn something knew, or hug a friend, these are extraordinary occurrences. How magnificent it is to take a step or open a fully stocked refrigerator. Just ask someone who can’t walk or a person who has no access to food what a miracle these things are. I’m clear that I want my whole life to be an offering, be it through DJing, chaplaincy, or how I behave on the Starbucks line. I’m clear on the inherently fallible nature of humankind and that I will be bitchy, greedy, angry, deluded, idiotic, and moody. I’m clear I can begin again when that happens. I’m clear that I will no longer let fear drive the bus, and that love must be the only force that guides me. I’m clear there’s no time to live any other way. I’m clear that when I act from love then any mess will clean itself up, and I’m clear that fear will not vanish but that its hold over me will keep loosening. I’m clear that the choice between love and fear is that black and white, and that we are alive to make that choice. I’m clear that the more I live fully, honestly, and with integrity that when it’s my turn to die I will do so with peace in my heart. I’m clear that I’m proud of myself, that I love myself, and that anyone who tried to convince me I wasn’t precious and deserving was very wrong. I’m clear that there is so much more to learn, get close to, appreciate, and experience. I’m clear on the absolute interconnection of all things and that manure nourishes and encourages growth.

Here’s to another 45 years in which I can continue on this path of trust, love, expansion, compassion, and connection. We don’t need a birthday to embrace these qualities but the reminders sure don’t hurt.

I am clear I am reborn every single day.