A Birthday Wish

There is an Appalachian birthday song that goes like this:

“When you were born, you cried
And the world rejoiced,
Live your life so,
That when you die,
The world cries, and you rejoice.

Unless you are a child, 34 is not old, but with coronavirus as the backdrop to my 34th birthday, I woke up this morning with thoughts of death. Death is the substrata to the other anxieties that are swirling now. Financial instability, social stagnation, physical inertia are all real and pressing anxieties—but ungirding them all is the ultimate anxiety of death—my own, or someone I love.

I sobbed my way through my 33rd birthday last year. News of my dad leaving my family was three days old a year ago, and his departure, upended my sense of stability in the world and left me reeling for months. The aftershocks still come, and now they are accompanied by this tidal wave of global instability.

I started this blog five years ago today. In my very first blog post I wrote about instability. I wrote about boulder fields in Wyoming—rocks, bigger than cars, that perch one on top of the other, like a set of marbles made for a giant, that can sway under a light human step. A landscape shifting under foot that makes you see with alacrity that stability is an illusion.

It seems that the lesson I am delivered each year on a grander and grander scale is this: the only certainty is change. Changes that creep in over time, like water slowly eroding the river bend into a deeper curve, and changes that happen in an instant, leaving you shattered, standing in the mine field, catching fragments falling all around you.

Over the last five years I have become very attuned to the ways the world can hurt you, and I realize as I head into my 34th year that this attunement has created a deficit in attunement to how the world can save you. Like the beach comber looking for shells, I look out at the horizon with eyes trained to see sharp edges, dark holes, and breadcrumbs that lead to the witch’s den. And there is much to catch the eye.

My question tonight is this: what does it mean to get to the end of your life, and rejoice? A religious faith for some perhaps, but for me, it will be this: that I have loved well. That I have not just trained my eyes for the places and people that hurt, but that I have also trained them for the places and people that heal. That I have noticed, appreciated, and celebrated those connections—no matter how small or large they may be.