vantage points

Today is my birthday, I am 58. And I am happy. At 58, my happiness comes from internal factors, not external things. By now, like Anne Morrow Lindberg writes in Gifts From the Sea, I have shed many shells, especially the heaviest most cumbersome of all, ego. I am feeling free from the external pressures of society and its distorted definition of how my life should be.

 I really just wanted to post and acknowledge how wonderful this vantage point is in life and encourage you to look forward to it or for those of you already "here" , look ahead with anticipation. I look back on the journey thus far and I see my evolution. I see the certainties I have always known, my core that was there in college as an art student and in my youth. I was in a place of “truth”, a place where I stayed in touch with myself and what I believed.I read books like Lust for Life and kept in touch with "me" through journals and of course, I painted.  But, then, I see the detours I took. I consider these detours weakness in my journey – places where I was successfully influenced by external forces and I deviated from my core values.My fault.My bad.

 I feel I am back where I belong now and it is  comfortable and right, for me.  I do, at 58, feel some anxiety, however. It usually manifests itself as apprehension about the future for my children, and your children. I watch them as they go down their paths and hope that, for the most part, their decisions are authentic and come from a place inside of them, a place where it is only their voice, their spirit that they hear; I hope they can keep the noise out. But, I also know that with living, there comes inevitable “lessons” and we all need them so that at 58, we can feel we have gathered enough knowledge to feel, in some small way, that we have “arrived”.

So, today is my birthday and I’m happy. Thank you so much for the wishes; those wishes, those acknowledgments, and you are the “things” in life that, for me, matter.



b u

p s