On birthdays.

My birthday just passed within the last few days, I won’t say exactly when but in the last week.

Birthdays are minefields for a lot of people, minefields in that they can be our most wonderful of days or our most terrible, all having to do with how we approach the day.

Long ago, something clicked inside of me and rather than making my birthday some incredible celebration, I focused on just having a nice day. It sounds inane, ludicrously simple, but there is a challenge in the concept of the basic nice day.

Think of it as a day free from the petty annoyances and anxiety over those little challenges we all face during the course of our daily existence, the moments when we are not at our best; the affront while we are in traffic, or maybe in line at the supermarket, all the little insults that wear away at our nature like water eroding a rock.

Good days.

My birthday was a pretty good day as days go. Nothing exciting, nothing earth-shattering or eventful, just a decent day that ticked by painlessly.

I spent part of the day on the scooter. This is a newly discovered joy. Even though I have had my scooter for a little over a year now, I find myself I am just embracing riding, as I grow more confident in my skills.

Even though a clear mental image of me on the scooter, a la the bear on the tricycle at the circus dances around in the recesses of my mind, this bear still has great fun taking his tricycle out.

In the evening, I went to a ballgame after going to a favorite place for Korean fried chicken.

It was a simple but good day.

There was a time in the past when I really thought my birthday had to be THAT GREAT DAY! By that I mean, it had to have some enormous, earth-shattering celebration.

I remember vividly when my thinking was adjusted; I made the mistake of going into work rather than taking the day off. Without going into detail, it was just a miserable day. No birthday should be spent at work, ever.

It was that one particular birthday that did it.

Ever since I realized that the best gift I could give myself was just having a good day on my birthday and I’m glad I kept the string going this year. (1284 Views pre transfer)