Celebrating My Birthday Instead of Stressing About Milestones
I turned 37 last week and while it doesn’t feel like a big milestone (other than landing me officially in the “late” part of “mid-to-late 30’s”), it has prompted a moment to reflect.
Watching my kids get excited about their next birthday and getting older realizes that we don’t have to stop being excited about aging just because we are adults. For kids, a new age means new possibilities, new skills, new things they’re able to do, new milestones, like losing teeth and starting a new grade.
For adults, we tend to dread those markers that things will never be the way they were before. Skin losing its elasticity, qualifying for a senior discount, getting closer to retirement, but still worried about what that would look like financially and emotionally, caring for aging parents, the list goes on. But what if as we aged, we thought of it as unlocking your achievements? What if we thought of aging as a badge that we made it this far? What if we thought of each birthday as a celebration, not just of the year that has passed with a touch of grief it’s behind us, but with excitement about what the future year is going to offer?
There’s an iconic scene in the TV show Friends where Rachel realizes if she wants to be married by 30 and have kids by the time she’s 35, she needs to be further along that path than she is now. When we hold ourselves to the strict standard of “this is what I think my life will look like at this age” we’re just setting ourselves up for failure.
As a planner and project manager, I am a very goal oriented person. But I am careful to never assign a “by the time I’m this age I want to look like X or have accomplished X” goals. It just doesn’t build in enough room for life‘s leaves and bobs and twists and turns that keep it interesting and exciting.
Yes, I would love to run a half marathon at some point and one day I will put it on my list of goals for the year, but I’m not going to say I need to have achieved it by a certain age. If Fauja Singh can run a marathon at 100, I’m going to take the pressure off myself to accomplish it right away. Because right now I have other priorities like being present for my kids and that’s the thing I care about the most.
