I've always seen a birthday as an anniversary...

I've always seen a birthday as an anniversary.  Not necessarily of anyone joining this world, or of our bodies growing older.  I try to not put to much merit into the physical flexibility of my body, 'can I still touch my toes now that I'm 28?' or into the typical checklist of things to have done by a certain age.  House, kids, career.. they'll all come when they will.  I, instead, try to use a birthday as a reference point.  How far have I come since my last one?  Anybody that knows me knows I will usually force people into reflection, and typical birthday questions from me include 'what have you learned in the past year?' and 'what are you hoping to accomplish this year?'.  And anybody that realllllly knows me, knows that I like asking questions way better than I like answering them, so bare with me while I try...

I've gone through a growth spurt this year.  Not a physical one, or an intellectual one, not even a spiritual one, as much as it may seem that way.  What I've gone through is a recognition growth spurt.  This year I've arguably recognized more about myself than any year previous.  I've started recognizing what does and doesn't align with my value system, I've been slapped in the face with the recognition of the unadulterated luck that seems to come my way, and I've even discovered some ineffective personality traits that could use some gentle attention.  What I may have recognized the most about, not only myself, but every single person is that we have choice.  In the revolving door of the conversations with ourselves that fill our heads, we have the opportunity to choose what it is that we are filling our own heads with.  I'm not in charge of what it is that you put into your door; if 'I'm not good enough' or 'everything is boring' are your choices then so be it.  If instead, you choose to constantly remind yourself that 'no one knows what they are doing' and 'everything will happen as it will', then that is your choice too.  French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's favorite subject was choice.  David Foster Wallace explains in his commencement speech, while telling a story about 2 men arguing in a bar about religion that 'it's easy to run this story through a kind of standard liberal arts analysis: [...we] never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from.  Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys.  As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language.  As if, how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice.'

'...how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice,' -I love that.  Everything is a choice for us.  What clothes we put on in the morning, how we present ourselves to the world.  What mood we are in, how we react to the situations we face during the day.  Who we surround ourselves with.  Even how we talk and think about the pivotal moments in our lives, and how we let them shape us.  It's easy for a lot of us to see 2 choices in front of us.  Am I going to be happy or sad today?  Am I going to have eggs or yogurt for breakfast?  But what we sometimes forget is that there is always a secret 3rd door.  Or 4th, or 5th, or we don't have to go through any doors at all... We can choose to be accepting, or pensive, instead of happy or sad.  We can choose to have oatmeal instead of eggs or yogurt.  Or we can even choose to go to the airport, get on a plane to Paris and have a french croissant for breakfast if we'd really like to.  We can choose to react to situations differently than we ever have before, we can choose who we turn to for advice, we can even choose how we take that advice.  But that's difficult for us to imagine, because all of this choice makes us dizzy.  And that dizziness makes us want to stand still, or as Sartre would put it we start to use 'bad faith'.  We give it up to the idea that we don't get to choose or even want to.  I know that astrology is not always everyone's favorite topic, and it might be complete bullshit, but like any other personality tests, I do think we can allow it to give us language.  We can decide that a website will never be able to tell us about our personality, or we can read the language and decide if that aligns with the truth that we feel about ourselves.  My sign is notorious for knowing ourselves very well, as well as being highly resistant to change (which we all know I'll be faced with a lot of in the coming year, by the way).  Either way my horoscope for this month had strong undertones of a shift in perspective.  Now, I can choose to resist that shift, cross my arms, and refuse to allow that in.  And for me, the draw to that is strong.  I like who I've become.  That was a long road for me.  And I like the people around me.  And if I allow my perspective to shift how do I know that those who support me will continue to?  If I continue to change who I am, will I start to fulfill a different role in their lives?  And if that happens, will they continue to fill the same in mine?  But then I have to remind myself of the very thing that I'm talking about, choice.  We can choose to be afraid of who we may turn into and how it may change the things around us, or we can choose to lean into it and remind ourselves that if we keep a close pulse on what we fill our revolving doors with, we have the opportunity to continue to change for the better.

As I enter the 28th year of my life, my goals are to aim to continue to hold a magnifying glass up to my revolving door, trust the people in my life to tell me things that I would not have been able to tell myself, and continue to recognize the choices that I have in front of me, even if they are behind the secret 3rd door.