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My Birthday Gifts To Myself

I’m writing this on the morning of my xth birthday.

Why the x?

Not because I don’t want you to know how old I am (although sure, that’s part of it – guessing is part of the fun, right? 🙂 ) – but because partly, I don’t think it really matters to me anymore how much age is ala age is just a number – or perhaps this is a manifestation of that age dread that comes when a person has reached a certain number?

In any case, because it’s my birthday, I hope you won’t mind if I take part in a little self-indulgence:

It’s a fun thought to realize that life is so different from how I imagined it might be at a later age – I am more secure in many aspects of life that maybe I should have figured out earlier in this process of learning to be human; there are many different things I never thought I would try or that I would ever pursue and get good at, even as time passed and the tradeoff between vitality and its reward began to bloom out.

This year, I am thankful for friendship and nice hikes (see the little hike that I went on this past Merdeka – credits to Joey, the diretor of Her Second Act; thank you for the conversation on the hike!)

Seen: Hiking Kaki membership renewed!

…And I am also thankful for myself for providing the following gifts to myself:

  • The ability to DJ – I played a full set this morning with multiple different transitions that I wasn’t able to do coherently until today, only to realize that somehow this morning, it all flowed.
  • The ability to play the cello and to improvise on music with the piano – Something that I hated with a passion when I was younger, only ever thinking that it was “for losers” and that this skill or talent wouldn’t ever be something I would value or cherish. How wrong I was.
  • Abs and 12% body fat – This is a nice one; can’t really get to this point without effort, planning, and constant learning.
  • The ability to speak and have people pay attention – it’s not a huge number of people, but it does make me pretty happy that people value my insights and thoughts in different ways.

Is there a unifying principle to all these gifts? I suppose there are at least two – the first in that they are related to some kind of way of changing myself into a new person as the old departs – not by external factors, but rather by what I can control; can’t DJ, play the cello, get abs, or speak effectively without practice. These are not material things – they are capacities and states of being. The second? They all require effort and constant practice that miraculously, I’ve been able to balance as part of this game we call life.

It would be nice to say that there is a third unifying principle – that they represent the fruit of my finite time and that alone – but that is untrue. It would be nice to romanticize these gifts and to say that they are all the fruit of effort and that money wasn’t involved – but that would be false; I paid for my DJ classes and for the equipment I practice on, the cello and the cello classes I’ve taken for several years, the gym membership and the classes, and the camera equipment, editing software, and machine that I create and edit videos on – and they are things I would like to integrate into my career as a person, not because I intrinsically think of them as ways of earning money, but rather because they are elements that I consciously chose to integrate into my life and that I think if you consciously choose to integrate anything into your life, it should be in all aspects, work included, as you move towards the highest level.

There are some other things that I could say about this, but I do remember that there is one final gift that I should be thankful for:

My decision to write this post this morning.

Each of these moments of adherence to my chosen identity as a writer is certainly a gift, and one easily forgone.

It was not so today, though – and for that, I am thankful – as I am to you the reader for taking part in my little flight of fancy this morning.

Incidentally, there are many birthday gifts that I cannot give myself, but one of them I will mention is this:

The happiness and health of my friends and loved ones from across the world.

I hope you will be healthy and happy – wise I can’t really say since I’m not really wise myself, but I am glad for your company and your interest in my life and the things that have come with it.

Thank you for reading, and I’ll have more to say in a bit 🙂

The Things We Don’t Want To Do

I’m writing this in the middle of a somewhat sluggish feeling after waking up rather late in the morning. I’m also doing it after practicing the cello and reviewing my DJ skills, reflecting on everything I did the previous day. Throughout this entire process, my body and mind are kind of pulling me back, a small drag on my consciousness, saying, “Wouldn’t it be better not to be this thing now?”

It’s not a sharp feeling by any means, just the sense that “maybe we can rest” or something like that. Internally, though, there seems to be a little clock that is ticking forward regardless of the situation, and it is getting stronger with every waking moment. As the drumbeat goes from a pitter-patter into a steady march of forward thunder, I’ve always had a tenuous relationship with consistency.

I practice the things that I don’t necessarily want to do. My goal is multiplying, but my effort is not keeping pace. The effort stalls, my body and mind drag, and eventually, there’s a great giving up. The past few months have been quite different, though, and it’s hard exactly to say why. Perhaps it’s because I now see that the things we don’t want to do are often exactly the things we have to do, that we may become the people that others may not.

Or perhaps it is not realization, and instead, it is a process—forward-moving control, almost like a force of nature, but less like the wind and more like the great opening of the fissures of the earth along fault lines that had already existed. It is meaningful to be able to watch this and observe it, to gain a little bit more momentum each day in the search of the person I am becoming with each moment.

Force of Habit

The reason I’m typing out this post now is because a system I created worked, and that is a fact worthy of celebration. It could have been otherwise, but it is not so.

Why?

Because today, at variance with other mornings, I sat down in the middle of boiling water for coffee, opened my laptop, and there it was – an autogenerated tab right on the posting page, where I could just casually start writing without any friction.

Didn’t even have to think about it – it was just there sitting in front of me, the keyboard was working, the tab was there – every single item was in place.

This reminds of a tried and true reflection I have had over the years – that so as all happy families are alike yet unhappy families are unalike in their own ways (as famously inverted by Peter Thiel), the “happy family” producing this little piece of writing is the concord of multiple blockers being removed, so as to make the task easier, more simple, more natural.

Speaking of “natural”, I suppose there’s a natural limit to this kind of thing – that at some point, to achieve greater ambitions, a person would have to lock in and take part in more advanced orchestration.

Yet, as we know, life is a holistic game made of multiple interlocking games – win or lose is never about any individual game.

But that doesn’t stop me from celebrating this particular win.

Happy Saturday, everyone!