A BD Reflection by TB

Birthdays are a funny thing. 

When you are young, they are something you endlessly celebrate.  At some point, you roll out of that celebration into the "important" ones:  21, 30, 40.  After 40, most folks stop tracking exception for the decades (50, 60, etc.) and (at least in the U.S.) the most important one, the birthday you can apply for your retirement.

Although I do not formally "celebrate" birthdays like I used to (here, it is going out to a dinner of your choice and some kind of dessert), I do find that they make for useful points of contemplation about life to date and life going forward - this one perhaps more so than most, given all that is going on in the world.

My life, in general, has turned out to date nothing like I intended.  I had never given much thought growing up to what my life would look like and so sometimes it feels as if I the script for my life was written by a fairly confused author with a complete inability to generate a coherent plot:

 "He can go to school for political science, but have no idea what he is going to do after school - no, wait! I can have him go back to school to get an advanced degree in a subject and let him think he will work internationally.  Then I will confuse the reader by having him go back to retail, then let him teach and be part of a musical duo - which he will love - and then have everything go away when he decides to enter the Biopharmaceutical industry.  Yeah!  And then, I will have him apply to the ministry and get rejected and suggest he back to school for a Ph.D. in Ancient History, which everyone knows is a dead end career so he will never do it.  I will have him move around in job and in home, then tease out that he can start a business in real estate - then have that fail and have him have to go back to Biopharmaceuticals.  Irony!  Pathos!  This is Pulitzer level stuff.

Next, I will have him get rejected again for a role in church leadership (for no reason - raises the emotional impact) then have him lose his job and end up moving halfway across the country.  He will have that job, then switch to another one where he first succeeds and then gets pulled off the career path.

Just add in a marriage, children, and a variety of hobbies and interests - man, this is great stuff!  My editor is going to love this!"

Editor when he sees the manuscript:  "What was he on when he wrote this?"

Probably not that dramatic, but you get the point.

The one thing that, I suppose, troubles me to this point is that there truly is no singularity of them or purpose to my life, no overall encompassing plot that I can see, no unifying idea.  Just a series of events that have carried me hither and yon and left me, today, with the feeling that I am at some kind of crossroads that I cannot see nor define but am slowly being edged towards bringing to resolution.

What lies ahead?  I have given up trying to predict anything at this point:  two months ago I could have told you how the rest of the year would have gone, today I cannot tell you what next month holds.  Which is really what life is like, I suppose.

So I will sit here tonight, blow out my candle on my Vanilla cupcake (Vanilla really is the best of flavors), and perhaps simply just reflect on what the future might be like, even if I cannot predict what it will be like.

Happy Birthday to me.