It seems sort of expected to recognize certain dates, much as many of us would perhaps prefer not to. I have a dear friend who commented on this day that "That's a dumb birthday." I know exactly what she means, and I agree. However, it's no good pretending it isn't one, I guess. Certainly numbers divisible by 5 make better birthdays.
In any case, here's another one, and if I were Chinese I'd be even a year older. Since that culture reveres age, maybe that would be better. A daughter-in-law sent me a greeting via Facebook. Do I have to thank her the same way?
It seems in these times of early retirements that there is a surprising number of renegades working full-tilt into their nineties. While I admire them, I can only wonder what it must be like to have such a love affair with their jobs or their missions. And I pity those who do this because they can't imagine what to do if they don't keep working at their paying jobs.
We (my husband and I) looked forward to "retiring" so we'd have time to do other things than those we'd spent so many years doing. Of course, jobs weren't all by any means, since we felt duty-bound to volunteer. What we hoped was that we could, in our declining years, pick out what to volunteer for. Well, we did, but it turned out (as we should have known it would) that the choice was limited by our responses to perceived needs. As many have said before us, "How did we ever have time to go to work?"
These unoriginal ruminations are, I suppose the inevitable result of passing years. What seems to be the trick is finding enough things for which we are either needed or for which passion remains to keep going with chins up and looking forward to another day, or week, or month, or even year.
I, for one, can't help looking back, but I hope I face the direction I'm going in most of the time.
1 comment:
Happy Dumb Birthday, Joan!
At the end of each season I feel twinges of sadness, time moving on, another season of my life fading into the realm of memories. I always wonder: Did I get all the goody out of that fleeting transition. Then I think...I will do better, I will try harder to stay in the moment, to see with the eyes of a child learning something new and awesome. I have to practice, practice, practice this exercise in Being, it doesn't come naturally. Our options seem to narrow (notice I didn't say diminish) as we age. I still believe there will always be new options to discover and new mountains to climb. And best of all for us Virgos, there will always be new processing to develop and explore. We are all about the process.
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