Always celebrate your birthday!

Somebody said to me recently that they were told as a kid that they should make the most of their birthdays up till they were 21, because after that it would all be downhill and they wouldn't want to celebrate them. Until a couple of years ago I probably would have agreed with that statement. Right from the age of about 16 I didn't like getting older, I was a late developer at everything and I always wanted my actual age to match up to that, it felt like time was always flying by. All throughout my twenties I still celebrated my birthdays, but with each one came a sense of sadness that I was growing old too quick or that I wasn't quite where I thought I would be at that age, when my 30th approached I felt positively doomed. Everything changed when a couple of years ago my sister was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 40, when she turned 41 I kept thinking about the fact that this was probably one of the last birthdays she would have and I wondered how it would feel to know that the milestone that comes around every year, wouldn't be coming again. As I turned 33 this year, my first birthday without my sister, I felt nothing but grateful, whatever my age I had been blessed with another year of life, and that was something to celebrate. In a world full of the hurdles of crime, illness and stress it's an achievement to have successfully navigated yourself through that and to have been spared to see another year of life, and somewhere out there in the world people are being told that they won't see their next birthday, while we still have the hope of others to come. So on your next birthday no matter what age you are turning, take the time to celebrate, it doesn't have to be anything big, but just something that pays tribute to the privilege of growing older in this world.