40 Years Old and counting

Happy birthday to me! And to my Friend John, whose birthday was yesterday, and Gregg's wife Elaine whose birthday is tomorrow. New decades for all of us!

I share this exact birthday with:

Abraham Lincoln
Charles Darwin
Father Joseph Wresinski
my friend Lucrecia's son
two of my friend Catherine's three children

Our horoscope for this week is:

"To be young, really young, takes a very long time," said Picasso. I agree. It's not easy to hone your ability to see the world fresh over and over again. You've got to work for years to immunize yourself against the millions of people who think they're got everything figured out. To cultivate an ingenious and fully awakened innocence, you have to continually shed your temptation to rely on habitual responses, never ceasing from the effort to greet every experience with a beginner's mind. This playful approach to life goes against the grain of every religious teaching, every political system, and every ideology, which means that only the fiercest individualists with a highly developed sense of self can summon the courage to do it. It so happens, Aquarius, that you're now primed to make rapid progress in this noble undertaking.

Thank you, Rob Brezny. Although I disagree with him that all religious teaching opposes fresh thinking.

I'm basically excited about turning forty. I feel grown up enough and accomplished enough to be forty years old. With my genetic history, this is probably about half way for me. But my first mammogram, which I had yesterday, that made me feel old.


Thank you, Chris, for making me this cake, all by yourself!