Happy Birthday #28
Better, Faster, Stronger, More Tranquil!
< eyes open >
I woke up this morning and was 28.
Lying in bed, I could see the single tree outside my window flapping its leaves in the wind against a rare blue sky.
Yesterday, I walked through a park I had not been to in six years, and found there a tranquility and satisfaction that for so long eluded that distant younger visitor.
This past weekend, I saw a horse race for the first time, and shared Kentucky beer with an Irish jockey in Chengdu.
Last month, I interpreted for world leaders, creators, thinkers, and communicators, and was so inspired by their conversations that the stirs of ambition rattled in my bones like a hungry chant.
Over the summer I bicycled from Helsinki to Oslo, over a thousand kilometers of meditation-in-motion, lakeside camping, perfect natural beauty, and the ever-constant consumption of fresh strawberries.
Last winter I spent time with my family, the most precious time of all.
And exactly one year ago today, I sat by a quiet lake and wrote a birthday letter — just like this one, and yet not just like this one — to you, my dearest and most beloved friends, soul-mates, and scattered journeymen of this vast and maddeningly exciting earth.
We can go back further, telescoping backward year-by-year, a cascade of October 17ths. In my mind, I cast for memories of birthdays past like Ebeneezer Scrooge flipping through a photo album of chocolate cakes, Chinese barbeques, goldfish, harmonicas, Thai transvestites, wild dogs, and broken hearts. Perhaps the whole point of birthdaysis to serve not as an anniversary of one’s entrance into the world, but rather as a series of colorful flag-posts that dot the trail one has wandered within it. Birthdays — for me, anyway — may not be reliable milestones of maturity (I think anyone who has had a bar or bat mitzvah will back me up on that one) but are handy bookmarks in time and space, bright visible buoys on a cluttered sea of memory, the attached mental images glittering sharply like frozen specimen of younger selves waiting patiently to be examined.
I’ve been interested in the past recently; re-reading old journals, listening to family stories both familiar and unknown, reflecting on conversations and experiences I’ve had with all of you and how those conversations shaped me. Surely there is no subject as fascinating and self-indulgent as the study of one’s own history, encounters, evolution, and roots.
So for my birthday this year, I’m asking you all for a present:
Give me a memory — a treasured snapshot, story, or impression — of a time or experience we shared together. Whatever strikes your mind, not necessarily the grandest or most outstanding memory; minor details and trivial glimpses are welcome. Something one of us said in passing conversation, or the color of the chair I was sitting on when we met. For those of you that have celebrated birthdays with me (mine or yours!) I’m particularly keen on those memories, the farther back the better!
Don’t worry, of course — I haven’t yet sunk into paralyzing retrospection, and just as I linger on the hidden highlights of the past, I continue to scheme passionately for the future!
Crystal ball I have not, but the sneak peeks reveal that in my 28th there will be new adventures of the mind body and soul; new plunges into the bizarre, new fantastic leaps to beyond the absurd; there will be roaring laughter and stunning silence, throbbing glorious attainment and dismal poetic retreat; there will be yet bluer skies and more perfect landscapes; fresher strawberries and higher peaks of power and fame. The leaves will dance harder! The meditations deeper! The jockeys more Irish! Ladies and Gentleman, I give you the official motto of Jonathan’s 28th Year on Earth:Better, Faster, Stronger, More Tranquil!
:) ya’ll know i’m just joshin’ with you. . . . .
Much love to everyone of you, enormous gratitude for the memories we have shared and giddy anticipation of the new ones yet to be forged!
Yours truly and with panache,
Jonathan
