I recently celebrated my sixtieth birthday. As I kissed my partner goodbye at 5:30 a.m.
on my way to mysore practice, I asked her what I should do with my day? She’s not generally very awake at that time,
but she suggested I pause to celebrate myself.
Pretty insightful from a sleep induced haze, I thought!
The day went pretty much as you would expect. My next younger brother left a message that
included the comment that I was the first one of the five of us kids to reach
that age that we’ve all been dreading.
Uplifting, indeed! But not to
worry, I hadn’t been dreading it. The
next younger brother sent an email commenting that it seemed like yesterday
that we were just kids. Yep, that
inspired me too! I’m more interested in
experiencing the moment than looking back.
Then I got a card from my sister, which lovingly poked fun at creaky
knees (which I don’t have!). But
Hallmark made reference to the card being brought to me by “The Irritating
Sibling Society”. Seemed appropriate!
But I did have an experience which really spoke to me. I was scanning through the Harvard Business
Review blog posts and came across one entitled “The Benefits of Poetry for Professionals”. So I read through it, and the links it
provided to some poems. One of the poems
was Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death”. Thinking of death is not something that I do
as I try to live in the moment, but as I read the poem it caused me to think of
changing it to the following (with apologies to Emily Dickinson):
Because I could not stop for my Sixtieth Birthday,
It kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Mortality.
We slowly drove, it knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too.
For its civility.
So why don’t we do that with Life – take time to smell the
roses; to pause and celebrate ourselves.
That’s the reminder I took from my birthday reflections. Hopefully you can too.
