I have started thinking of my birthday as my own personal New Year.
January 1 is the Gregorian's calendars New Year which isn't even really the new year so my birthday gives me a real opportunity to stop and think about where I am, what I have learned and what I want the next year of my life to look like.
This year I turned 63, and I decided to spend my birthday weekend by myself in Colonial Beach, Virginia. By myself because I can do and go where I want to go and not have the noise in my head about what others are thinking, wanting, etc.
I didn't go with some big agenda. I just wanted to get away, spend some time near the water, explore a new area, and have time to think. What I didn't expect was for so many seemingly unrelated things that happened over the weekend to begin connecting with each other. By the time I was packing to leave the hotel Sunday morning, I realized that the entire weekend had somehow become a lesson about something I had read about years ago in a little blue book.
Going Back to The Tools
Something made me pick it up and re-read it before my birthday. I took notes and drew the very simple pictures in the book representing the five tools: Reversal of Desire, Active Love, Inner Authority, Grateful Flow and Jeopardy.
One of those drawings is about Inner Authority and the shadow. The idea that stayed with me was that we all have parts of ourselves that we push down or hide because somewhere along the way we decided those parts weren't acceptable. Maybe we thought other people wouldn't like them, or they didn't fit the image we had created for ourselves, or they were connected to something from the past. Whatever the reason, instead of integrating those parts into who we are, we put them somewhere in the background.
The Day Started With the Sun
On the morning of my birthday, I woke up in the hotel and the sun was coming through the window. It immediately reminded me of another drawing in that little blue book about Grateful Flow. That caught my attention because lately I have been deliberately trying to notice the natural world more: the sun, moon, stars, trees and water instead of moving through life so quickly that I don't really see any of it. So there was something fitting about beginning my 63rd year with the sun shining into the room and me noticing it.
The $20 Dress
The outfit I had put on for my birthday was cute but it was too hot for it, so while I was in Colonial Beach I found this loose black linen dress with beautiful turquoise, gold and white embroidery. It was $20, it was cool and comfortable, and I loved it.
I received compliments on that dress throughout the day, but I didn't realize how much I stood out until later that evening. At the jazz program at Ingleside Vineyards, a woman came over to me and asked whether I had been in downtown Colonial Beach earlier. When I said yes, she told me that she knew it was me. She had seen me on the street earlier in the day, and she and the people she was with had actually talked about how stunning I looked in that dress.
That was remarkable to me because I wasn't trying to be seen (but maybe I wasn't hiding either). I was just walking around Colonial Beach enjoying my birthday in a $20 dress I had bought because I was hot.