A birthday post

It's that time of the year again...my birthday.  It's a milestone birthday which is good.  But it's definitely been a year of ups and downs.

I tend to get moody around big birthdays, and go from being really happy to really melancholy.  I am an extremely lucky person with decent health and a good partner and a job and stable place to live.

But around birthdays (much like this one) I sometimes dwell on what I have versus what I wish I could have. Certainty in the future, removal of stress from rising costs, adult decisions, and changing relationships with friends and family.

Life is not easier as you get older.  "I think that I could have done more this year," that's what I always think almost every year.  I think about what I would do if there was two or three of me.  There is never enough time, and that's the thing that's always so tricky...time is tricky.

A reading on my birthday.

First Reading: Colossians 1: 21-23

21 And you, whereas you were some time alienated and enemies in mind in evil works:

22 Yet now he hath reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unspotted, and blameless before him:

23 If so ye continue in the faith, grounded and settled, and immovable from the hope of the gospel which you have heard, which is preached in all the creation that is under heaven, whereof I Paul am made a minister.

As I reflect, this Bible reading is very apropos for my birthday: because there have been moments of great darkness, thinking about the future, and being alienated is certainly a feeling I feel, the older I get.  I have come to realize I am an adult, I am no longer just a young person who can get away with doing as he wants, nor is that the kind of person I envision for myself.  

But one thing I have learned through this year, in the face of great nihilism: faith is central to everything that I do, and that is my mantra going forward into my adult years.  The mistakes I make are my own, but the good that I do in the world is a fundamentally through something greater than me.  What is good, what is real in this small blue world is about something other than me.

So, even in a year with great mistakes and many moments that were both sad and hopeful, I'm looking to the future.  I still feel there are great moments in time waiting for me.  There is much more good to discover in the world.