A Birthday wish
Time is as measurable as a kitchen counter. The seconds click evenly, they make minutes, which make hours, which make days that march on rhythmicly with their own beginings and ends. Starting long before we were here, this process will continue long after we depart. Time is infinitely measurable, but despite its physical properties, the way we process, experience, and understand time is as variable as the number of waves that land on the shore.
Time can stand still, time can be wasted, it can be saved. Some days feel longer than others. Everything set to happen in three years feels further away than events of decades past. Time is a gift, it is a curse, and its passing is inevitable.
Counting time, tracking days and years, is something we all do in a futile effort to gain control of our surroundings and our daily lives. We try to get the best of time, but none of us have ever succeeded. Time always gets the best of us.
Birthday’s mark time. Marking time is a well-trod path leading only to sorrow for what is lost and anxiety as to what is to come. It leads to individual worry and rushing, collectively we live in its grasp.
When we feel free is when we perceive to be out of time, detached from the hold it routinely has on all of us. You can measure time, but there is no metric for relationships, for emotions, and for experience. The amount of joy or sadness that can be felt over an hour is unmeasurable. The amount of growth a relationship can receive in an hour-long conversation is immense. The more we look at the things that matter, our relationships, our emotions, and our experiences, the more it can be understood that time is a box we all possess, that will stay with us for our whole lives. We can’t escape it; we must carry that box, which is finite in its existence, but it is infinite in its capacity.
My unending wish for you, my desperate desire, is that in the hours of your life, in the moments big and small, good and bad, sad and happy, that you worry less about where you need to carry that box next, and even more so worry less about where you have carried that box in the past. Put your energies and efforts into filling it in whatever moment you are in. Overflow it with the moment.
Regret (worry for the past) and anxiety (worry for the future) closes a flap on your box, making it harder to fill in the moment.
A simple prayer that sticks with me even now after is the Serenity Prayer. “Lord, give me the peace to accept the things I can’t change, strength to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” When we lose youth, we gain wisdom. When we hold on to youth, we lose peace. Rely on your wisdom to give you peace and channel your strength, not of body, but of character, mind, and soul.
No matter where you go, that is where you are. You are here. Surrounded on the daily by people who love you, people who rely on you, people who need you. That can feel like a burden, but it can also be viewed as privilege. If you were not worthy of love and trust, capable of caring, and filled with an attractive character and personality, you would not be loved on, relied on, and needed the way you are.
When you blow out your candles and close your eyes tonight, and reflect on the years gone by and the years to come, my birthday wish for you is that you know, even if you don’t believe, that you are worthy, you are accomplished, you are beautiful inside and out, and you are loved, right here, right now. Whatever moment you find yourself in, no matter how much time tries to take its toll, it can’t empty the box if you fill it with that.
