FDR. Gene Hackman. Phil Collins. Christian Bale.
That’s all fine and good.
But every year, I forget – and then am forced to un-forget – that I share a birthday with Dick Cheney.
Despite that, I had a decent birthday. Pink striped pajamas ’til noon. Debriefed the Constitution kids in my signature manic style, and got new ideas for an alumni institute. Got sushi, got presents, got myspace messages, got phone calls, got cake. I was gifted and celebrated in a nice low-key manner. All that was missing was one of these. And family. I do miss my family.
Twenty-nine is just one of those ages. It’s the age at which countless women in the forty-something range seem to want to be frozen – if you believe pop culture. Twenty-nine, then, supposedly means the last days of youth, maybe even the last days to accomplish the goals of youth.
My goals… some certainly are checked off the list. I’m married, and we just bought a house. Things like that are easily listed, easily crossed off.
But I’m also, I pray, growing wise. If a measure of wisdom is awarness of the great volume of things we have yet to know or discover, then I certainly meet that. I’m growing comfortable in my own skin. I’m growing confident, and recapturing a fearlessness of youth.
In between those sets of things are great grays of dreams and goals, all run together and mostly unnamed. Career goals and artistic goals, and all the markers like Titles and Income that come with those, seem lacking. Though I took great strides in those over the past year, it’s easy to feel – after an intense campaign season – as though I’m back where I started. Underemployed, sleeping ’til double-digits, lacking schedules and deadlines and reasons to get up in the morning.
I told the Constitution kids today how the We the People competition is set up to parallel the acts of American citizenship. You have to make yourself want it. You can’t just sign a contract to do the work, you can’t just treat it like Any Other Class, and you certainly can’t do well by following a simple rubric. Finding the passion, finding the motivation to overcome all the reasons not to step forward and achieve and live – such is the WTP competition, such is citizenry, such is life.
And I’ve got two out of three. Learning the third, living the third, is the task at hand. It’s the task at which I’ve felt the least amount of recent success.
Taking this all into account – overcoming the balance of the contradiction between the exceptionalist aura in which I was brought up and the lack of specialness that global instant connectedness and, frankly, sheer numbers force me to accept takes a drive, a focus, a swift kick in the ass that I’ve been weakly able to harness. And even then, only for brief times. The discipline of self-starting, of overcoming the critical mass to whatever’s on the other side of that line, is my task at hand.
It’s on my list, right next to painting the kitchen.
And, hey, at least I don’t get presents like this on my birthday.
