Every year, you’re forced to celebrate the day you arrived on this planet… wait, no were not aliens…

Every year you’re forced to celebrate the day you came into this shiny, strange world. It’s a day to commemorate you turning another year older and another year wiser. Though the latter is not always the case, as I know from experience, it means another year flushed down the drain and your life closer to its finale.

It seems like such a dark and calloused look on the ordeal, but, alas, that’s the way I’ve viewed them the last few years. To my defense, it’s tough having a birthday in the winter months, when everything’s cold and dreary (at least where I live), and that seasonal depression stuff is in the air like pollen at all other times of the year. The hopefulness of spring, the fun-spirited joys of summer, and the beauty of fall, have all come to an end and grumpy, gray winter has settled in.

Now, I don’t wish to make excuses and I definitely don’t want to play the blame game here, it’s just kind of how it is. For me, I don’t like growing older, I don’t like feeling that another year has passed without living life to its fullest. It sucks, I despise it, and birthdays always remind me of those things. They force me to relive the past year and see just how wasteful I have been with my time, or how short I have come to meeting my own expectations for the year, or how I’m stuck in certain places I wish to be unstuck from but can’t see any way out of. Still have any desire to wish people “happy birthday”?

Thankfully there is always a “but” to be had when writing about these kinds of things. I believe in hope. I believe, even in the darkest, scariest, and most painful places, there is light to be seen; a light that shatters the darkness. This birthday, for me, has been different. I’m lighting hope’s candles and not extinguishing them this time. I’m not focusing on all those “could’ve”, “should’ve”, “would’ve” possibilities. Believe me, there are many of them just waiting for me to fall into their traps, waiting to suck me in and spit me out the other side beaten and bruised. But I’m looking at the present, where I’m at now, and how I’ve gotten here. Life is precious and life is all too short. There are blessings around every corner, if we but open our eyes to them.

So, happy birthday to you; to all of you, each and every year. Let us not focus on the downfalls of each passing year, but the good. And let us glean from the past but never get stuck there, for progress is made step by step.

Don’t forget to have a piece of hope; I here it’s delicious!

Love unlimited,

C.J. Huffman