On Turning Older

 

 

I turned 37 today.

Every year I receive an email from myself on my birthday, a letter from the previous birthday reminding me of what is important.  Asking myself the questions we tend to ponder when our birthday rolls around and our own mortality becomes more apparent.

This year I noticed the pattern; are you slowing down?  Are you relaxing?  Are you eating better?  Are you exercising more?  Like the ghosts of long lost new years resolutions, my birthday letters have become reminders of what I should be doing but don’t.

As I see my children grow older, I feel my own years adding up.  I don’t feel old, but I know in the eyes of my kids, I have never been young.  I have never been a teenager, nor an early twenty-something who had no idea what her future would hold.  Instead,  I have always been Mom, someone who seems to have many things to do and who sometimes raises her voice or is tired. Who sometimes misses that amazing dance move or that quiet moment playing.  Who sometimes tries to be everywhere at once and thus ends up being nowhere.  Who never misses the big moments, but is sometimes absent from the small.  Who carries more guilt about how she uses her time than should be allowed for anyone.

And so as I drove home this evening after a day of celebration, it struck me that perhaps I am going about this whole life thing a little bit wrong.  That perhaps it is not about changing habits, although, I should do all of those things, that perhaps it is, instead, about changing my attitude.

Perhaps the change I need to make this year is not to do less work, but instead to enjoy the things that I do more.

Perhaps it is not to slow down, after all, when does that really work for most people, but instead to live in the moment of what I am doing and find pleasure in that.  Because is it not in the mundane details that our lives are lived?

To stop feeling so guilty and instead embrace the things I am doing rather than pining away for the ones I am not.

So for the year ahead, I will enjoy more.  I will not try to fight the battle against time or carry the guilt of all of the habits I cannot seem to change.  I will find the pleasure in what life has to offer, even the details we seem to never notice and be at peace with that.  Be at peace with myself.  That is the gift I can give myself right now.  And for right now; that will be enough.