44. If you had asked me when I was 16 if I would be alive when I was 44, I probably wouldn't even be able to imagine life beyond the nuclear holocaust we all just knew was about to happen at any moment between the USSR and the USA, or the AIDS epidemic was going to kill all but the chaste... Yet here I am. Alive and fairly well all things considered. But it's just another workday amongst decades just like it, nothing at all like it used to be. Hell, if it weren't for the automatic reminder on Facebook I think only two people would have remembered! But I'm not complaining, I'm something of a recluse and to expect more would be unfair to all the otherwise great people around me, that I just don't spend enough time with to get invited to their birthdays!
But as this day has progressed, I've thought about birthdays and remembrances in a different perspectives. My X, who has custody of my kids and gets a substantial check, and has nearly every Friday off from work, not only didn't remember it was my birthday, offer to let me have a Friday to go be a grown up on but she's out with her new boyfriend, and will retire to her new cabin on a lake next to one of Tennessee's most beautiful landmarks (that I pay for with child support)for yet another romantic Friday night with boyfriend #11 since she met me, on her unending search for Mr. Romantical Superman...
But who is really missing out on what's important in life? I mean really, I'm about to head off to have supper with my daughters, the two most important people I'll ever know.
And I've had an epiphany of sorts, that sort of changed my whole perspective on life. My girls play softball, and they were wanting to get on the all-star team, so I had to explain to them that only the girls who have "their head in the game" will make it to the all-star team. And it dawned on me that my biggest challenge in life is that I do not have my "head in the game". Regardless of how fair life has turned out up until the very next second of your life, if you properly apply your mental abilities and physical abilities and "get your head in the game" tomorrow will be better, or at the very least, you'll have your eyes on the road again, and sooner or later, things will get better. But only if you keep your head in the game.
It's the damn drama of life that keeps most people's head's out of their games. As if any one of us has a "new problem" that hasn't been survived by who knows how many tens of thousands or millions of human beings before us? But we're born with built in mechanisms that monitor all interactions for fairness, and we're prone to be selfish, self-serving critters, without purposeful effort to the contrary. So drama happens to us and we loose the will to keep our heads in the game.
But that's not the end of the story, it's just the end of a chapter. Each one of us finds ourselves given the chance every day to stop. Just say no to Drama! Once a person frees themselves of all the emotional surges of a Drama reduced lifestyle then even a difficult life becomes bearable. If this isn't true, then why have all the poor people of the 3rd world nations not committed suicide by now? They understand something we've become too important to pay attention to.
And it dawns on me, that it's not your birthday that's important, so much as your Awakening day. What day was it that you woke up from a dramatic life ruled by the stormy seas of runaway emotions? That's the day we should go out and celebrate every year!
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