Birthdays

Dear Reader,

I celebrated my fiftieth birthday this week, and I love it! I feel younger than ever and wiser than ever – even though I feel like I also have more to learn than ever. Fifty feels like the perfect half-way point. I have enjoyed, this week, looking back over the past fifty years of my life, and I am excited to look forward to the next fifty. My intention is to live to be at least a healthy, happy hundred years old. I figure from that point, I’ll take life year by year…

I have heard people refer to this birthday (50) as one of the “big ones.” Perhaps any decade-changing birthday is seen that way, although ages ten and twenty tend to get lost in the shuffle. But once you start considering thirty, forty, fifty, sixty… the power of life markers often comes into play.

Personally, I enjoy the significance of life markers, and I’m finding that fifty is a big birthday for me – in the best of ways. I love the intention of living to be at least one hundred – and being healthy and happy as I do it. That vision is fun; it lights me up and makes me eager for more living. It conjures up images of all the contributions I can make to the world in that time, and all the love I can give and receive.

Yes, I know; anything can happen. Life is a mystery, and I honor it as such. So I know there may be other plans for me, and I do reserve the right to change my mind at any time! But right now, today, my vision feels so right and gives me so much joy that I recognize it as an important guide for me to follow.

If birthdays can serve as markers in our lives, and if we choose the meaning of those markers – what will we choose?

I honor your loving heart,

John