Birthday Blues
The Birthday.
It seems to signify so much; what I do, who I'm with, how I feel, where I am, what I'm thinking of, what my focus is.
As my birthday is right after the new year, it feels more like the New Year to me. It is the start, a fresh beginning, that I feel strongly about and that I always lose my temper on, burst into tears, feel grateful, happy, love the attention, you name it. All the range of feelings come up and I can't hide from them. It feels raw and vulnerable.
I always think I want to do something special on my day, and I never end up doing anything special. Just the Day in itself IS special and if I allow it to flow and flow with it, it seems to have great meaning and power for the year ahead.
I have to admit to having a lot of anxiety around this day. The feeling of time passing is too urgent, it scares me. I'm way too aware of it.
This year more so than ever. Life and time seems to be passing faster and faster. My little baby Pi is now a small boy, fully communicative, with his own wishes and desires, his own personality.
My grandmother, who I sincerely believed had superpowers and would live forever, died just a few weeks ago. Walking through her echoing, emptied apartment the other day, remembering all my childhood memories, one in each corner and cupboard, made it all feel so fleeting and sudden. So much life had been going on there in that flat, and this is what it came to. Echoing emptiness. The echoing stillness of a life that has ended.
And with each kick in my belly during my Day, I felt the beginning of a new little life coming into this world, destined to be born exactly 100 years after my grandmother. This cycle of life and death, moving and flowing out of my control. Moving so fast.
Control is an illusion. LET GO.
I used to tell myself this line, I read it somewhere. It was all so easy when I was a free spirit who worked freelance jobs and travelled and looked for spiritual meanings of life and thought I had it all sorted.
Little did I know how different it would all be when I had a family. When you have everything... you have everything to lose.
So much love and so much to live for now, and yet, it is scary, and it's so challenging to live for others and not just follow my own heart and let the wind blow me in whatever direction. Now I have this huge responsibility and this huge commitment, which is at times overwhelming. I'm growing roots in one place, and it's very against my restless nature. I'm building something, which used to be my biggest fear- getting "stuck" somewhere. And still I wouldn't have it any other way, of course. This feeling of unconditional love is bigger than any journey I've taken alone into the unknown, is more developing and evolving than any yoga ashram or university degree and more meaningful than any spiritual conversations had under the stars along the freedom path.
But it's scary, and it makes me aware of time moving on, new generations coming into this cycle of life and death, life taking us on this ride. I wish I had control over this ride, but I'm starting to feel more and more like I really don't. None of us do, no matter how much we think we are in control over all of it. I focus more and more on things I do have control over and become a little bit fanatic about them out of my fear of losing control.
The only thing we can do is to make the most of it and take care of our attitude towards the whole thing.
One of my birthday messages was from a person in Namibia who I admire a lot, who was always an inspiration to me. He mentioned this; that the people with the correct mind frame towards life will always be the happiest. The people who are able to see the funny side of it all, able to laugh about it all, able to enjoy, to turn the downsides up. He's so right, and I'm so thankful for the reminder. It doesn't mean I'm able to put it into practice, in fact- right now I'm finding everything too overwhelming, too tiring. Mostly I would prefer to just be asleep and rest through this winter, this pregnancy, this darkness.
I had my special yoga practice on my Day, where I wrote some intentions for the year to come, and really tried to breathe them all in.
They are all about family, focus and work, and within all that to try to be able to stay in the here and now and enjoy it, whilst it's all still here. Soon enough my children will be older and this intense period of raising small children will be over- and I'll miss this intimacy and craziness, for sure. I wish to really stop longing to go somewhere, to change my life into something else all the time, and to be able to appreciate the moment and my life as it is now. This now is a precious gift, with all this love I'm blessed with.
I'll try to start to meditate again to still my mind.
Happy Birthday to me, January 3rd 2015, 36 years old.