That Time of the Year

If you've followed the metamorphosis of this blog, you could probably surmise how huge July is for me, it being the singular, most narcissistic month of the year because it's my birthday month.  Sara Bareilles has a new album out and I was listening to her commentary about a song she wrote called "December", her birthday month.  It turns out, we share the pensive mood surrounding our birthdays.  There's this covert pressure of being somewhere better than you were the year past, and for me, the leading days are the tentative approach to the day where I muse on the weighty question - Am I a better version of myself than ever?  

After four months of putting up (sometimes with hands flailing in the air in frustration) with a torn knee ligament and meniscus due to a ski accident in March and barely dodging knee surgery, I'm finally back on the yoga mat again.  And in a brief lucid moment in savasana when I was gazing at my life impersonally as if it weren't even mine, a settling feeling of contentment washed over me. 

I had spurts in the past where sadness loomed like an ominous cloud - not for things I could not possess or acquire, but because I was unrecognizable to myself.  But now, that's a distant reverie.  A full week before the actual date of my (auspicious!) birth, I have calm.  I have equanimity.  I celebrate not just another year of my life but I celebrate that I do so with recognition of who I am, where I belong, and what my place is in this world.  I am grateful and I realize that this is a gift, this clarity that life is about earning and deserving the great things - not the ephemeral, material ones, but the intangible, ethereal ones, the ones that take a lot more painstaking work.  And I pray for an unstoppable momentum to be the best human being I can be yet, year after year after year.  

Namaste.