My birthday was yesterday.  As birthdays go, it wasn’t the greatest I have ever had.  My family forgot, which isn’t a new occurrance.  My friends at work celebrated with me, but there wasn’t anyone to give me a special present, no friends called to take me to a special dinner, and I ended the night alone with a bagel and my computer.  I have to confess, I was a bit depressed.  Then I started thinking, and I realized that I had, so to speak, planted the seeds of my own destruction.

Part of settling for more is opening myself up to people and opportunities that will bring more into my life.  As I said in the first post I ever wrote for this blog, I have built myself a life of moderation.  My first instinct is still to hole up and keep to myself.  As much as I want to experience new things and meet new people, I’m still giving into my fear that doing those things might upset what I perceive as my sometimes precarious balance. 

The upside is that I can change the way I behave and the way I think.  Half of any battle is recognizing who or what has caused the problem.  There was a time in my life when spending a somewhat lonely birthday would have been blamed on everyone but me.   Now I can see the part I played in things being the way they are.  If I can see the problem, and I can take responsibility for my part in creating the problem, than I can fix the problem. 

I think the hardest thing for me to accept about this idea of settling for more is the fact that to get more you have to do more.  You have to take more risk, have more new experiences, and perhaps, every once in a while, be more hurt or sad than you might otherwise choose to me.  Settling for more requires bravery.  It also requires a fierce belief in your own self worth.   If you don’t believe you’re worth the effort and the struggle you might just settle for less. 

It is 364 days until my next birthday.  My goal is to make the post I write about my 40th birthday a very different post from the one I wrote about my 39th.  I have the bravery and the determination and a plan.  Most importantly, I know I’m worth it. 

I guess it is time to get serious about settling for more.  

Tomorrow, February 5,  is my birthday.  I will be 39 years old.  I’ve never been much of one for worrying about how old I was, and turning 30 was sort of a relief for me.  My twenties were a rough decade, when I went through a lot of serious stuff, and I never felt like the carefree kid I always thought I should have been while I was in my twenties.  When I turned 30, I felt like I could be an adult.  It was a relief.

To be honest, I probably had the same angst anyone has about aging until my Mom got sick.  My whole attitude toward the aging process changed when my mother got cancer.  She’s been gone for five years now, but I can still remember watching her fight so hard for every birthday, every Christmas, and every year she got after she was diagnosed.  She died 11 days short of her 57th birthday. 

From her I learned that aging isn’t something to be feared or deplored, it is something worth fighting for, something to be clebrated.  Most of us, if we think about getting older at all, think about it with dread or with concern.  Aging is an especially touchy subject for women, since the prevailing wisdom in a lot of quarters is that older women are less desireable.  Men age and get distinguished.  Women age and just get old.

Ever since my Mom died, I’ve made it a point to be grateful for each birthday I’ve celebrated.  Given my gene pool, on both sides of the family, I could live a very long time. The women in my family tend to linger on into their nineties and pretty much stay physically and mentally active right up to the end.  There are never any guarantees, something I know very well since my Mom’s death, but it may be that I’m no where near the half way point of my life. 

There are times, some of which have been pretty recently, when I forget that every year is a gift.  I wonder why things aren’t exactly as I’d like them to be, why I can’t meet that special guy, why I don’t lose weight as quickly as I want to, why I can’t kick this cold that seems to be sapping my energy and dragging on and on.  I won’t play Pollyanna and say every day is fun, because there are some bad days.  I will be slightly Pollyannaish and say I still consider every day, good or bad, a gift.  I’m here, I’m breathing, and in 24 hours I’ll have another chance at another day.  

You can’t ask for much more than that.