Birthday Wishes

Saturday night I had the perfect moment under the stars. Sitting around a bonfire with my daughter laying across my lap, I managed to feel how insignificant all my latest worries really are compared to the vastness of the dark. Not a small feat considering that I could make worrying a sport. As she and I gazed up at the stars with her tiny voice telling me to look at how beautiful they were, I released a deep breath into the open sky and decided that it was okay that yet again I didn’t have all of the answers.

This perfect moment came at the end of a horrible week where the tension had been building slowly each day. I’d had a terrible birthday. Not that birthdays are typically all that great. Who wants to celebrate getting older after 21? I have the added bonus of teaching teenagers who believe anything over twenty is old. They certainly have a way to make a person feel ancient even at my age.

Normally, I don’t think much about aging. I’m sure there will be a number I reach that it will begin to bother me, but it hasn’t happened yet, so I’m not going to dwell on it and create a problem before it arises.

What does bother me is the sense of failure that comes as each birthday ticks by. The sense that I haven’t achieved all that I wish to achieve hits home every birthday. And this year was no different.

Before sitting out under the stars Saturday night, I was feeling lost once again. A feeling I thought I’d left behind after I’d made first one decision than another to take in the direction I believed I needed to go.

That was until this birthday week hit. Added to the normal failure I experience at this time of the year, my final divorce papers had arrived by mail Saturday morning. The sense of failure had enveloped me in a dark cloud, and I began to question once again what I was doing.

I’d made all these decisions to get to this place in my life where I felt I should be, but nothing ever went exactly as planned. Had I simply made more of a mess of things?

Some of the frustration and disappointment is impatience, but some of it is that I still have so much to learn. One of those lessons I still struggle with is to live in the moment and know with certainty that everything will work out as it was meant to. I’m still working on Faith. I’d say It’s more like a math problem that every time I work it out, I get a different answer. I’m still trying to find the correct answer.

The 33 experiences were supposed to help with that, and it has some. But now it has become a race to finish them before the end of the year. I intended the experiences to be about learning to live in the moment. But those moments come like my moment under the stars, surrounded by the family who are always there me.

Apparently, my life is a work in progress and not for those who scare easily. I do believe that it will be a great ride, and hopefully, one I don’t have to enjoy alone forever. It makes me appreciate those who are there for me even more though.