Another Year is Worth Celebrating

It’s my birthday and I’m going to feel the ache & eat a cupcake by the light of an REI solar lantern…

Today, as I’m writing this, is my birthday, the 8th of July—I’m officially in my late twenties. For what might have been the first time, I reckoned with the symbolism of celebrating a birthday: I felt the vastness of what one more year in this human body means. To experience another year is something worth celebrating, indeed.

In the name of celebration, I went camping this past weekend near Southern California’s finest (only?) lake. There’s nothing like a clear sky full of stars, the smell of pine, and no cell service to remind us that life is so very beautiful and that we are so very lucky to get a taste of it. Life can be so brutal and shocking, too—there’s nothing like watching a massive cicada fly into the fire and shrivel up in an instant to remind us of that. How shockingly brutal and beautiful this existence can be. How tenuous, unpredictable our time on this earth is. How we ought to appreciate those slivers of time. How important it can be to recognize that we got to experience another year.

I get the birthday blues, no doubt—does anyone else? I call it the ache, which comes periodically and reliably in early July. I felt it over the weekend; cried into the lake about it. The ache is a bluesy, tender kind of emotion, the growing pains of my spirit. I can never pinpoint what exactly the feeling is, or why it’s there—it’s just achey. It’s kind of like love, sadness, joy, and pain are twined into a little ball and thrown to me to hold in my chest for a while. It doesn’t leave unless I feel it, and I’m learning how to hold the knotted mess, feel its weight until it disentangles. There’s something age has brought me: a greater ability to let feelings live their life, without trying to figure all of them out. Sometimes, I just feel heartachey-for-no-reason. And that’s just…life, I guess.

In the hopes of connecting with at least a few of you who read this—and at the risk of sounding a little self-indulgent—allow me to reflect on the wisdom this year has brought me.

A dominant theme of the last 12 months has been control: specifically, having to confront the astonishing lack of control I have over, well, pretty much everything. I used to cling to my sense of agency, try to exert it over anything that came my way—claiming my personal agency was a theme of much of my early twenties.

Now, I understand that most of what happens (and even how I react to what happens) is not really up to me. Perhaps personal agency is not so much about believing you are the one steering the ship, but more about accepting responsibility for your choices, and remaining connected to your intuition as you make those choices.

So there’s a valuable lesson, which I’m sure I’ll have to re-learn again and again: even if you think you’re the one in control—even if it really feels like you are in control—you never really are. What if you surrendered more to what life is serving you? What if you quit resisting the parts of life you don’t like? Allowed yourself to collaborate with what life has for you, rather than try to force it to adhere to your mental agenda?

I’ve found a great deal of freedom in the perspective that I’m not the one controlling life; I’m just the one living it. I just show up and do my part as best I can, without getting too involved in what isn’t up to me. Honestly, if there’s any place where we do have power to influence, it’s the perspectives we take. The way we view things is adaptable and can be shifted with a little attention and intention.

In that same vein of giving-up-control, I’ve learned this last year that I don’t need all of my usual self-help practices in order to like myself. I, by no seeming conscious choice, gave up a lot of the things I thought made me better, healthier, or happier. I just…stopped doing them. It’s not that those things were bad—in fact, some of them really were good for me—but needing to check off a list of self-betterment practices is not how I want to live. It isn’t intuitive, it actually disconnects me from my intuition.

I learned this year that I don’t have to live with an arbitrarily-created mental rule book. I don’t need to relentlessly try to change myself or restrict the good stuff in the name of “health” or “wellness.” I don’t need to give up gluten or exercise every day; I don’t need to process my emotions in ten different ways or only read nonfiction in order to...what, exactly? Feel good about myself? 

In the absence of all of those practices, I actually like myself and my life more: flaws, neuroses, gluten-filled croissants, silly novels and all. Life is genuinely more enjoyable when I’m not striving to be perfect. After many years of believing I need to change myself to accept and love myself, this lesson feels really significant.

No longer living with a rule book or a laundry list of self-help activities has led me to consider what I can use to determine what to do. Paradoxically, my intuition—what so many of my practices were trying to help me “connect” to—is what’s left. I’m learning that I can rely on my intuitive senses to get me through; that I can make judgments and decisions based on my morality, my values. I’d rather live connected to these senses—intuition, morality, values—than adhere to arbitrary routines and rules that (forgive me for this phrase) no longer serve me.

And so, I am not starting my year with any specific goals, because most of the goals I ever set end up changing. I don’t really know what I want to be doing in a month or six—that will depend on the information and feelings and circumstances of then, not now. Far be it from me to restrict my intuitive flow for the sake of achieving a mental goal I set months ago.

That said, I do have some conceptual kinds of goals—things I want to work on, practice. In the year ahead, I’d like to deepen my capacity to feel appreciative for what I get to experience. I’d like to get better at surrendering to the organic flow of life, to spend less time worrying. Above all, I’d like to practice allowing what is to be what is, instead of trying to control or change it.

If we are not the ones steering the ship, we might as well be eager passengers, ready to lean into whatever experiences come our way. We don’t really know how much time we have here—we might as well celebrate when we get another year.

Maggie