Aging is a gift, our chance to get better, stronger, wiser. Birthday rituals help me focus more on this, less on the anxiety of aging.

The strength of her hands is what I remember most about Emily. Her hands dug into the twisted tissues of my neck, the kinked chain-links beneath my shoulder blades. 

We talked, at least early in the hour, about staying healthy. What to eat. How to stick to exercise. I was a 20-something then, a regular visitor to Emily’s massage therapy practice.

We talked to find the right, helpful level of pressure. Too much, and my muscles would just tighten.

Because … Wow, her hands were really strong.

I asked Emily: Was her hand-strength from her training for a triathlon the year before? Maybe. And massage, of course. She’d recently turned 50. I wondered if her triathlon goal had anything to do with that big, milestone birthday.

Yes, she said. It had EVERYTHING to do with turning 50.

When Big Birthdays Shift on You

I’d not thought about that conversation — even as my own 50^th birthday approached — until I read a post in a Facebook group from a woman nervous about turning 30, and started thinking of a helpful response.

I read her post right before my morning bike ride. She used the word “old.” Kindly, and with curiosity. Whatever “old” is, I’m closer than she is.

So as I pedaled the country roads, in-between saying good morning to the cows and admiring handsome red barns, I thought about what to say.

What would you say?

“Hah! You’re a baby!” is useless to a young woman sharing her fears and looking for comfort, perhaps even wisdom. 

After some mental rooting around, I remembered those late 20s. The birthdays sort of shift on you. A lifetime begins to feel limited. Short. Finite.

Not for someone else. For you. For the first time, aging is personal.

Sweet 16 is gone. The excitement of becoming an adult at 18 and legal drinking at 21 fades. At least for me. 

Thirty gets your attention and tugs at you: So … now what? None of us live forever, so what are you doing with your one, short little life?

More mental noodling later that week as I gardened, thought about birthday rituals, and learned from my readers about their birthday rituals.

Those Big Birthdays Are Loaded with Reckoning

Here’s what I would say to her: 

Happy Birthday!

I get it, sweetheart. Aging is scary. Those big birthdays are often loaded with fear and anxiety. Those milestone numbers remind us our lives are finite. They deliver a reckoning: Are you sure you’re on the right track? (Of course, your anxiety may vary.)

What to do?

• Live!

Find and relish joy, wherever you can. Savor life’s lusciousness. Eat the ripe, juicy peach. Feel the grass under your bare feet. Sing out loud to the car radio. Let the sugary frosting of the birthday cake melt on your tongue. Sky dive, if that’s your thing.

• End obsession over perfection

Do whatever you can to cut off oxygen to this society’s toxic, poisonous, destructive obsession around physical perfection. Screw that nonsense. When I hear a young woman who is beautiful inside and out pick at her appearance, I want to scream.

(Full disclosure: I’m still coloring my hair, for now. Fear of seeing a full head of gray in my reflection is powerful and hard-wired. I’m working on this one.)

Your smile, your face, your body are all exquisitely beautiful right now, just as they are. Sure, we all want to look our best. Do it with tender loving care of your mental, emotional and physical health — without vicious judgment of your physical appearance.

Please re-read the paragraph above at least once, maybe more.

• Enjoy your youth.

Your body can do things right now that it might not be able to later. (That’s OK! Just look at what it CAN do!) Don’t take that for granted. Celebrate it. Live as fully as you can as you care for your body. It will change, and that’s OK. How I miss dancing past midnight. I can do it — I just don’t bounce back the next morning like I used to!

• Grow something.

Even just a houseplant. (Yes, a real, living one. It’s OK to throw a few dead ones out while you’re learning.) 

More importantly: Cultivate the garden of your soul. Weed out poisons and toxins. Sow goodness. Tend and water it. Let yourself be part plant and turn toward the sun. (This will make more sense if you watch The Karate Kid. A good flick now streaming free on Netflix.) 

• Buy the best shoes and bra you can afford.

Investment in your future health and comfort. Enough said.

• Plan ahead to combat the anxiety around milestone birthdays.

Fear and anxiety over aging come with the milestone birthdays. Plan ahead — like my friend, Emily. Training for a triathlon definitely sticks it to the fear that aging equates to weakness. How can you celebrate and get stronger? And someday when physical strength wanes, strive to be stronger in other ways, like the baseball pitcher who masters finesse over velocity.

In my 20s, I had very little wisdom, just enough to know that and seek it. Maine drew me with her lakes, rock, wild, crashing waves, sweet balsam forests that to a suburban kid from Cleveland smelled like Dentyne cinnamon gum. 

That smooth, speckled grey granite stone I keep in the kitchen that looks like a dinosaur egg is from a Maine beach. It reminds me of all the seeking and mistake-making I did on the Maine coast — and also does a fine job smashing garlic bulbs.

Aging is a gift, our chance to get better, stronger, wiser. 

And so — I created a personal birthday ritual to focus more on this and less on the fear, potential regret of a fleeting, mis-spent life.

Starting in my mid-20s, every year on my birthday I climbed a taller mountain in Maine or New Hampshire. As my age increased, so did my physical strength. This also likely had a little something to do with chasing a lyric about “the mountain” in the Indigo Girls’ timeless song “Closer to Fine.” 

After the West Peak and Horns of the Bigelow range, more than 4,000 feet, and Mount Katahdin at 5,269 feet, I climbed Mount Washington, the region’s tallest at 6,288 feet — and then ran out of weekend trips, possibly even interest in that ritual.

Which brings me to:

• Re-invent your birthday ritual as it suits you.

In my 30s, I took lake vacations around my birthday and spent the first day of each one lakeside, sipping coffee and reading essays and memoir from the beautiful and wise Maya Angelou. 

Over one of those thirtysomething birthday weekends, I biked from Maine’s mountains to the coast. A good challenge I returned to when 40 approached, and I trained among the rolling hills of central Pennsylvania for a flat, 75-mile ride in northern Ohio on a 95-degree August day. 

That was a good decision — because my 40s tested my core physical, emotional and mental strength with the crushing grief of divorce and the loss of my dad. 

• Re-invent yourself, as needed.

These losses were my fire, my kiln, making me stronger, better, wiser and more loving. I came out the other side on the precipice of a whole new adventure with family. I fell head over heels in love and stepped into this family life here in a small town in central Pennsylvania.

Then — 

Part of me wished to stop time. Our kids were already teenagers, growing up too fast for me, not fast enough for them. But no one — not me, even Cher — can turn back time.

The relentless clock reminded: 50 was fast-approaching with new anxieties. How did my actual accomplishments compare to what I’d dreamed of?

At 48, I re-committed to writing in a new way. I’ll either make it — or keep trying as long as I’m able. I’m beyond OK with that. Complete peace.

Here we both are, then—you and I—in this writing adventure nudged by my own approach to the half-century mark. (What you’re reading now, then, is kind of like Emily’s hand-strength and triathlon — all about my turning 50.)

• Reflection, ritual and reckoning

This year, when my actual birthday arrived in mid-June, I stayed home. Given the pandemic, we scrapped plans for a big bike ride with friends and a lake visit. The reckoning of my milestone birthday arrived as there was so much to reflect on: Deep gratitude that the pandemic had not taken anyone from me, a sense of collective grief for those who’ve suffered direct losses, a national reckoning on racism. (No, I’ve absolutely NOT done enough to combat racism. Where to go from here?)

From our porch swing, overlooking a sea of green vegetation instead of blue lake water — my gardens, the massive woodpile my husband so precisely builds every summer and out beyond the cemetary to the mountain ridge — I read a few random pages from Maya Angelou’s “Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now.”

Grateful, I took comfort in her words:

“I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver…The giver is as enriched as is the recipient, and more important, that intangible but very real psychic force of good in the world is increased.”

So there. Plaques and resume bullets are not the most important thing.

• Give.

Simply give, as best you can, from your own sense of joy and peace.

A final thought to the young woman approaching 30:

• Dream Big at any age. No Limits.

Reflect and dream about whatever brings you joy and is a gift to both you and others. Make it a ritual, a way to celebrate your life, then go do it. 

P.S. Happy Birthday!