Belly-Button Birthday
That's what they call the day you were born as opposed to your sobriety birthday. Well, it was mumble-mumble57 years ago today that Dora and Harold's first son was born. That's me. What a ride it has been so far. As time continues to move on things just seem to get more and more interesting. Which is really how it should be as far as I'm concerned.

Well, I have a hunch that author Anne Lamott would probably agree. I have just finished her wonderful sequel to Traveling Mercies. Plan B continues her at times "R-rated" musings on life and faith that is a pleasure. Perhaps someday I'll talk more about that. But for today I want to give you a series of her quotes on aging. They express it far better than I can in her chapter titled "untitled."

• I smiled with a secret smile of pleasure in being older, fifty plus change, which can no longer be considered extremely late youth, or even early middle age. But I would not give back a year of life I've lived.


• Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life- it has given me me. It has provided time and experience and failures and triumps and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit me now.


• I have grown old enough to develop radical acceptance. I don't think that if I live to be eighty, I'm going to wish I'd spent more hours in the gymn or kept my house a lot cleaner... On the day I die, I want to have had dessert. So this informs how I live now.


• If you haven't already, you will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply loved person. But this is also good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart. You dance to the absurdities of life; you dance to the minuet if ikd friendships.


• I love my life more, and me more. I'm so much juicier. And as that old saying goes, it's not that I think less of myself, but that I think of myself less often. And thst feels like heaven to me.

--from Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott