BIRTHDAY GIFT

Today is my birthday. And I decided to start it slow: watching the sunrise with a cup of coffee, a book, and a deck of cards in my hands. I can’t pinpoint exactly what I am feeling now. Turning 42 is not a dramatic shift from 41, so I should not feel anything different, but I do. Many people use New Year’s Eve to make decisions about the following year. I tend to project my year on my birthday, so I have been thinking about what projects I’d like to accomplish next year. Usually, I would have five or six different thoughts, knowing that I would only work in about three, and possibly only one or two would come to fruition. But this year, I feel more lost than ever before. There are too many ideas, but only one feels right. The other ones are, at the moment, in the embryonic phase, and they need to grow for me to feel the need actually to move them forward.

In addition to my inner world mini crisis, I look around at the state of our world, and I don’t recognize it at all. This is not the same reality I grew up with and not the promised land I was raised to be part of. How did we get here? If you feel the way I do, you also acknowledge we all have our share of responsibility for what this has become. But apart from pointing fingers to find the real villains, I ask myself how to change this in my immediate surroundings. I don’t have a definitive answer, and I don’t expect to have one today. Today, my birthday gift to myself was to watch the sunrise with a cup of coffee, a book, and a deck of cards in my hands. When in doubt, I like to slow down. Time is always the wise friend I need. In spending time with my thoughts, I hope to find an answer to what is bothering me and making me feel different this year. I don’t know what it is, but something needs to change.