Celebrate Your Life: Why Every Birthday Deserves to Be Special
I had a birthday this year! Since this publish date is 12/1/2024, there’s at least a 90% chance you had one too. If you didn’t, you will. When the kids were little, we tried to make birthdays into a wonderful celebration for them. As they’ve matured into adults, we’ve kind of let that morph into just a choice of what to have at the family dinner. I think I’d like to change that. I’d like to start celebrating my birthdays.
As we grow into our adulthood, especially when the kids leave home, we seem to care less about our own birthdays. It feels unimportant that we’ve added another number to our age. Maybe it feels selfish and self-important. I propose to you that it doesn’t have to. Let’s reframe our birthdays as celebrations of resilience and relevance!
Each Year is an Accomplishment
For the past 365, you’ve had things that required your attention, things that were yours and yours alone to do, obligations, duties, commitments. You’ve had trials, difficulties, challenges. You also had triumphs, successes, completions, and wins of varying scale. You have. If you were to go back through your calendar or planner, you could write a book on the things you’ve done, gained, and learned. If it feels like all you did was survive, that’s a victory! You did that! Surviving and thriving another year is, in and of itself, something worth celebrating. You are here to tell the tale.
Your Personal New Year
All around the world, people use New Year’s Day as a reset point, and I’m one of them. I hereby give you permission to reset any time you need to, and your birthday is a fine time to do that. Yes, even if your birthday is December 29 or January 3. Mine happens to be in June, so it’s kind of ideal. It’s almost exactly halfway through a year of either successfully making progress on my goals and resolutions or flopping and failing in ignominy. I’ve done both in years past, and I’ll do both in years to come. I’m okay with that, because I’m human. Priorities change with situations. Taking that birthday stock evaluation includes reflecting on where I’ve been and where I want to go, and setting a plan to get there. It’s kind of hard to do the “where I want to go” part without the “where I’ve been” part. Do the reset, but know where you are first. Celebrating your birthdays can be your own personal reset.
You Matter in the Bigger Picture
In your town, there are people who don’t know you. As we zoom out, there are more and more people who don’t know you. Considering the planet full of living things, we continue to shrink in significance. When we contemplate the aggregation of matter that we are in the universe, our importance dwindles to nearly nothing, doesn’t it? NO!! Because, in your town, there are also people who DO know you, and whose lives are improved in some way because you’re in them. Sometime in the past week, you said something to someone that they needed to hear, and you were the only one who could have said that. You held the door for someone, you provided an encouraging smile just when someone needed to see it. Through all your own struggles and trials, you were someone to someone else who needed you, and when that happens, you probably will never know it. You added value to someone else’s life – and that’s worth celebrating. You not only did that over the past week, you had 52 of those weeks when you did that. So when your birthday comes around, remember that you mattered to someone you didn’t know, and celebrate that. While you’re celebrating that, you can also celebrate all the times over the past year when someone else offered you a word, a smile, an open door, just exactly when you needed it. Celebrating your birthdays can help you acknowledge your importance to others, and remind you of others’ importance to you.
Celebrate in Your Own Way
Your celebration is yours to build and execute. I really recommend that it be something that you rarely do. A massage or a day at the spa; a beach trip; lunch out with a bestie; a candlelight dinner at home delivered from your favorite restaurant; a whole day of movies on the couch. It really doesn’t need to be extravagant to celebrate, it just needs to be different, but it does need to mean something to you. I keep wanting to get to the beach on the Juneteenth holiday, but for the past two years, we’ve had rip currents from tropical weather. This year if I can’t have a beach trip, instead of giving up and staying home, I’m going to find a spa and spend the whole day there. I’ve never done that, and I’ve always wanted to.
Overcoming the Fear of Getting Older
I know it’s kind of cliche that women don’t want to acknowledge their age, and I know both men and women who half-joke about not having birthdays anymore. Our bodies age, and even if we try to pretend that we’re still 29, eventually you’ll take longer to get out of an easy chair than you want to admit. Let’s change the frame! Let’s take a new look at the passing of temporal time. From now on, growing older is growing, period. The concept of “aging” is a testament to our experience and our resilience. Life throws junk at us all the time, and we’ve either dodged it or caught it and thrown it back. Claim those birthdays and own your number – just increasing that number is a success in itself!
Your Turn
Celebrating yourself and your birthday can be an expression of gratitude, and it can springboard you into the next year with a new determination to increase your significance in your world. How will you celebrate your birthday this time around? Let me know in the comments!
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