Showing Up

80 Percent of Success is Showing Up.
- Woody Allen, in "Life & Death"

June 22 was my 53d birthday. (Note to hackers: I can’t remember ever using my birth date as a password or even part of a password.) As usual, I spent the day recalling my sins, failures, errors and wrong choices. Then I spent the evening projecting trouble to come. It wasn’t a happy day.

The birthday blues are an annual experience. The fact is that I’ve failed at many things, made serious mistakes, and caused real harm. Also, there is much that I wish hadn’t happened. On the other hand, I have made a lot of good choices, I’ve had great experiences, and there are very good people in my life. Objectively, allowing for the fundamental limitation that I get to live only one life at a time, and accepting that the “happened to me” events were mostly non-negotiable, it has been a pretty good life so far.

I think it is time to be done with birthdays.

This is 2008 by the Christian calendar, which is in common use in most of the world. Although the year can be referred to somewhat neutrally as 2008 C.E. or common era, there is no avoiding the fact that 2008 is a count relative to the traditional birth date of Jesus of Nazareth. (We don't know that the traditional date is correct. Matthew puts the birth at a time when Herod was alive, which would be 4 B.C. or earlier. Luke puts the birth in the year of the Census of Cyrenius (Quirinius), which occurred in 6 A.D.)

There are other year counts. Many of them are religious at the core. This is 1429 in the Islamic calendar, counting 354-day years from Muhammad’s emigration from Mecca to Medina. This is 5768 in the Hebrew calendar (counting from “1 year before creation”). This is the year of the Earth Rat (year of Wù Zĭ or 戊子) in the traditional Chinese calendar. This is the 5109th year elapsed since the epoch or starting point of the Hindu calendar.

But a different year count doesn't help. No matter how the counting starts, counting by years means there will always be an anniversary day, a “birthday,” in which I will invariably sink into regrets and fears.

There is another approach. Digital devices -- computers, calculators, digital watches -- count elapsed time from a starting point, then make a calculation to display the date in the specified format. The most accessible of these for most of us is the count used in spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel. In Excel, day 1 is the equivalent of 1 January 1900. In Excel, my 53d birthday is day 39,621, allowing for the oddity that the count includes a February 29 in 1900 which didn’t exist but is counted to maintain consistency (earlier systems made the simplifying but incorrect assumption that every year ending in a 00 is a leap year).

Forget years. I'm going to count by days.

22 June 2008 is the 19,359th day of my life.

Thinking of days, I’m shooting for 30,000. When I get there I’ll revise my plan.

Thinking of days, my gifts to myself are to clear out all the slacks and shirts and coats and shoes and belts that I can’t or don’t use and give them away, to pile up all the books and magazines that I’m never going to read or look at again and throw them away or give them away, and to convert every bill that I know I’m going to pay anyway into an automatic payment.

Thinking of days, a few were not very good. But if I think of all the bad times, all the awful days, all the failures and bad choices, they don’t add up to more than a couple hundred days. Out of 19,359 days, the vast majority have been good days.

Thinking of days, out of 19,359 I showed up every time.

On June 23d, day 19,360, I discovered Psalm 118:24 running through my mind over and over again. “This is the day which the LORD has made; Let us rejoice and be glad in the day.”


(July 6, when I actually posted this, is day 19,373.)