If content = boring I am good with it

What turning 51 looked like

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I recently closed an email to some friends/colleagues: “In a nutshell, I am living a quiet, productive, and beautiful life. I’m probably verging on being boring.”

What a gift. 

Saturday was my 51st birthday and in advance of it, I shared an Edit Your Life episode called Birthday Reflections: Finding Contentment. I hope you will consider giving it a listen because in this world of striving, optimizing, and scaling—all of which can of course be fine and also be totally exhausting—I suspect many of us could use a dose of feeling good about where we are right in this moment. 

I spent the first couple of decades of my life mired in chaos and fear and the next couple of decades anxious and striving, so finally arriving at contentment in my fifth decade feels like winning the lottery.

In the days leading up to my birthday here are some beautiful things that happened:

• I made progress preparing for my spring wildflower garden project. I’m new to gardening and learned that when faced when a shitload of overgrown weeds, it’s easier to remove to the root when things are dying off. So, I found myself delighting whenever I found nearly dead weeds that I could easily uproot. I will let the other weeds die off before tackling the rest of the clearing project. (Related, I actually watched a YouTube video this weekend by some British dude reviewing a series of weed removal tools LOL.)

• I built my first fire of the season. Making fires is one of my very favorite things about the cold weather. LOGS FOR LIFE. This is a notable evolution given that the first time I tried to make a fire I wrapped a log in newspaper.

• I moderated a panel for Girls Leadership on their new research re: leadership in AANHPI youth. I love this organization and the people behind it, and it filled me up to hear all sorts of smart advice from the wonderful Dr. Hina Talib, Leticia Barr, and Nikita Jadhav on how to support AANHPI youth at home and in schools. There is obviously still so much work to be done to help young people feel seen and supported, but I felt so hopeful coming out of this event.

• I connected with some friends I haven’t been in touch with for a while via phone and text.

• I worked on and submitted a proposal with a friend/colleague for an incredible potential project. One of the great gifts of the last 15 months of being my own freelance entity is that I have gotten really clear on the types of work I want to do (and not do). Knowing that I can solve complex and wide ranging yet interrelated problems is so fulfilling. I’m thinking about creating an irreverent capabilities brief for myself—the real talk prose version of what I bring to the table for whenever I submit my next proposal. 

• I watched “Nobody Wants This” on Netflix. Because I am oddly curmudgeonly about random things, sometimes when everyone is talking about something, I refuse to opt in until years later. However, I had an evening to myself last week and decided to give the show a try. Netflix has felt pretty meh to me lately, so it was so wonderful to fall in love with this series. The chemistry between Kristen Bell and Adam Brody is great and it was refreshing to see a thoughtful, caring, emotionally fluent character in the male lead (what a sad low bar we have established as a society…). I had a lot of “awwwww” moments watching this show.

And then it was so fun to have my birthday land on a Saturday this year! Some notables from the weekend:

• I slept in until 7:30am, which is late for me and felt absolutely glorious. I love sleep!

• My kids made me the most incredible birthday cards and I sobbed like a baby reading them.

• My Mom popped by to drop off a card—I was not expecting a visit from her since it was her church day. Her card also made me cry.

• One birthday gift I asked for was a Spotify playlist with my family’s favorite songs. Despite the fact that I used to be a semi-professional musician and one of my college majors was music, I listen to music so rarely these days. I want to change that and the playlist they made me is fantastic.

• Laurel came home for the long weekend, which was such a happy occasion for all of us! She and Vi went out to get my complimentary Starbucks birthday drink, which was a treat.

• It was the second to last herbal CSA pickup on Saturday and Jon and I went to get the herbs. I was so delighted to learn about the healing properties of plantain, oat tops, and rosemary.

• Laurel, Violet, and I went to get pedicures, which was so fun. I find dealing with my feet so difficult these days (I really need to get progressives) and it was so sweet to see how much Violet enjoyed the treatment. Hot rocks for life!

• We got takeout from my favorite Mediterranean spot. I love cooking and I also love not cooking. Takeout is a birthday tradition in my house; it’s the best!

• My kids made the incredible coconut cream pie from The Capital Grille. It’s my favorite dessert and is very involved and decadent so I only want it once a year.

• Beloved family friends dropped off a new 1,000 piece puzzle for me and I have been delighting in it.

• There was a lot of together time in the form of meals, baking, cuddling, reading, walks, watching TV.

• I was largely offline on Saturday and it was really sweet to read so many kind birthday messages via text, email, Instagram, and Facebook over the remainder of the weekend.

• As it turned out I had a 90-minute bodywork session late yesterday afternoon, which was such a lovely way to close out the long weekend.

As I often say, the little things are the big things. I am so grateful.