Birthday Reflections

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.