Tomorrow, November 4th, I turn 38.  Another milestone, although birthdays become FAR less important as you get older, and especially when you have kids and all the household birthday-energy gets transferred to making their birthdays the special occasions.

But as a milestone, it naturally lends itself to questions like “what has happened in the past year?” “what’s been good?” “what’s been not-so-good?” and so on.

I can say with the straightest of faces that this has been perhaps the most turbulent year of my life, for a variety of reasons. Some of the items have been so personal that even an open-the-kimono blogger like me avoids discussing them, while others are what you might call fit for public consumption.  It doesn’t really matter the reasons.  Whether or not I could describe my year as “The Greatest Story Ever Told” or “Les Miserables”, a finished book is still in some sense a finished book, no matter what words were printed on its pages.  And I would really like to shelve this  book and move on to #38, hopefully with fewer repeat performances and more … newness.  More excitement.  More inspiration.  More mutuality.  More …. lots more of a lot of things.  The list is endless, and personal.

I will say one thing that went exceedingly well for me this past year – my fitness program.  That is one new thing I’ll carry over to the next year without question.  I’ve also made some wonderful new friends which I’m very grateful for.  I’ve been blogging very consistently and frequently.  I’ve learned a lot of new things in my profession and made a lot of great contacts.  I’ve excelled at my job.  I’ve been karmically rewarded with two very happy, healthy kids in whom I take the utmost delight.

Yet thinking about it further, maybe the best thing that happened to me was a novel, never-before-experienced sense of self-discovery.  I’ve always been introspective, but this year I probed depths that I didn’t even suspect existed. I learned a TON about myself, both during how I dealt with good times as well as bad times.  I learned (relearned?) what’s important to me.  I have a renewed sense of who I am, what I need, and what I want.  I think I still have a ways to go in terms of improving my ability to act on my convictions, but I’ve come a long way.

What’s not gone so well?  Better not to dwell on the negatives.  Acknowledge, yes; obsess, no.  There are too many opportunities in life to make oneself unhappy that one shouldn’t go around borrowing trouble.  I do hope, and suspect, that many of the lessons learned in year 37 will stick with me for a long time.

I’m too old and cynical to hope that tomorrow, when I wake up, everything will have changed for the better, all the leaves turned over, all the dust swept out from the recesses of my mind.  All I can hope is that tomorrow is better than today, and that the day after that will be better still; like a retirement fund, happiness is sometimes a long-term proposition and one has to be patient and wait out rough spots and have enough confidence that one can make it through to the other side as unscathed as best as one can.  So let’s hope that we’ve experienced the bottom of the market and that the bull market has already begun.

What do I want for my birthday?  Ah, if I told, then according to the birthday-wish tradition, those things most certainly wouldn’t come to pass.  But what I want is impossible for the moment anyway.  So I won’t dwell on wanting; instead, I’ll turn my focus to appreciating those things in my life that are already true, already make me happy and already make sense.