I must admit, I needed to pull up a January 2018 calendar to check the dates. The dates I am checking on is my sobriety birthday. Is there joy in the fact I have lost track of the actual date? I love that! I love the fact that I must revisit a monthly calendar to exactly realize once again those few days. The interesting part is the realization it was not just those few days, it was the journey I am celebrating.
This week I launched the first class of a “generative aging” group. The joy I felt, as I looked upon the faces of those choosing to participate in this journey through life, was so great I almost couldn’t contain it. Aging is a journey. A journey that starts at conception. A journey that takes some a century to complete. A journey that also can be cut short. A pilgrimage through the human existence on this earth. The faces of those participating are varied and all bring much wisdom to our video table.
January holds a date that many of my family may forget. My brother’s birthday as he was born January 3, 1949. Then he died in July of 1973, only two weeks after my mother’s father. That was a dark year for my mother. It came on the grief of May 15, 1946 when my sister was born only to die 18 months later with “water on the brain”, a condition today that can be managed, but then, 1946, was a death sentence. February 4 is the birthday of my youngest brother, born 1954, and died in 2011 at 56 from a heart attack. These dates all mean something if noted and marked.
I want to say my need to look up the date of my sobriety birthday feels good. While I bask daily in this birthday, I really do not need to mark it specifically unless I choose to re-member, or re-assemble, the momentary increments of time. While I can name these dates of the births and deaths of those above, I do not dread, nor do I set myself up to honour or mourn them. I make the choice to let them go into the whirlpool of that which is memory. The ebb and flow of memory allows me to recall and then let go again without holding on to the grief that could be attached.
Part of the generative aging mandate will be to allow grief to ebb and flow, seeing in our aging wisdom we accumulate so many memories. Some joy filled and others painful. That is the pilgrimage …. to walk along our lives caring, sharing and pull together all that there is to re-member, while choosing to live with joy and hope.
Today is my sobriety birthday. I was 58 years old before I let go of that monkey on my back. I drank for over 40 years and I could drown myself in the memories of the past that are unsavoury or I can soar with the eagles in the memories of the journey from that drowning to the new life realized, finally, in my birth on January 29, 2018.
May you choose also to soar, to be free and to generatively bring forward the wisdom of your past. If you need help reach out, tell me your story, I would love to hear it and help you along the road. My cup runneth over with joy, is yours?
#breakingstibah 