Today is my birthday and it was such a great day! Now normally I’m a scheduler and when I take a vacation day to be at home, the first thing that I do is to make a daily schedule so I can get everything done that needs to be done and in the most efficient way.
But today? I did take a vacation day and nope, there was no schedule. Now granted I might have had a list made in my head on what I wanted to get done, but I didn’t write it down with a timeline so that really doesn’t count.
So this is how my day went. I didn’t get out of bed until 8:00. I have to confess I was awake a lot earlier but it was one of those times when you are able to stay in bed and come hell or high water I was staying in bed! Then I picked up the house a little bit, did some dishes and laundry, did my first PayPal payment for my craft show in April (and it worked!), and then headed to town for some errands. I spent some time in the tanning bed while I was in town and then dropped off some clothes at our local Treasure Chest. Next thing I wanted to do was to do a little shopping. Now I must not have been shopping for a very long time because some of the stores had completely remodeled since I was in them. Well I wanted to see what they had out for summer clothes and if you are also wondering what they had – the answer is not much! I did find some good buys on a couple of things and then started to head home. Because it was so foggy today, when it started to get a little colder out the fog started to stick to the trees and the tall grass in the ditches. It was really pretty and looked like a whole different world. So I was in this kinda fog thing (literally 🙂 ) when I was driving home and remembering what one of my friends told me today that I am now a Senior Citizen (!!!!) it made me think about what or if I have learned anything these past 55 years. Because it’s about an hour drive home from the mall, I came up with 5 things on my list. So here are my lessons learned at 55 years old:
1. DON’T EVER EXPECT THINGS TO STAY THE SAME. Now I don’t want to sound like a training class that you might have been to, but the old cliche that the only thing that is constant is change is really true. We’ve had many things come up since we’ve been married from health issues to job changes and I’m betting that there will be a lot more that we’ll see before the next 55 years. So if you want things to always be the same you are so out of luck. Now I’m not saying that this is a bad thing and honestly it can be a good thing if you would want. They usually say that changes make you stronger. But for me? Changes make me much more appreciative of the people that I know and the things that I have.
2. DONT’ CHICKEN OUT. What I mean by that is there is a lot of things that can be scary and take courage to do. And if you chicken out on them, well you will never know what the outcome could have been. Now I’m not really a scaredy cat but one time when we were on vacation I decided that I was going to jump into a cenote. If you’ve never heard of a cenote before, they are usually a cavern inside that has water and an open ceiling with vines hanging down in the opening. So my adventure was to climb the staircase along the outside wall to get to the jumping platform. When I was on my way to the platform I was pretty excited and ready to do this. But when I go to the top and looked down at the people that were pretty small and pretty far away, I realized that maybe this wasn’t the best idea. I mean the water that I was jumping into was around 200 ft deep and so I thought just take a deep breath and jump. And so I did and it was AWESOME! Well it was awesome after I finally came to the surface, until then it was pretty black and scary. But then you floated on your back and when you looked up you saw a hole in the cave above you with the sun shining in and vines all hanging down from the ceiling. Now if I wouldn’t have jumped I would probably never had experienced this in my life and for me? Well I want to get the most out of every day that I can. We only get once chance to do what we want to and I for sure don’t want to be one of those people who say that they regret not doing somethings in life when they had the chance.
3. DO YOUR BEST. Now I know that I am not good at a lot of things and guess what? I’m OK with that. But if I at least try and give it my best than I think that it’s OK to fail once in awhile. Take my soap adventure for example. Will I make a go at it? No idea. But if it doesn’t seem like it’s something that I should keep doing next year or the year after that, well that’s OK. Who cares? I mean why not try it? Life’s too short to worry about what others are thinking that you should or shouldn’t be doing. I think try as many things as you can.
4. TREAT YOUR FAMILY WELL. Now when I say family I don’t necessarily think your kids or your siblings. When I say family I also mean your neighborhood family, your card club family, or your community family. These people are also your family and are just as important.
5. TAKE TIME FOR YOURSELF. This one is probably the hardest one to do and could be one that hardly anyone does well. My example is that today I took the day off as a vacation day from work and was thinking about what I would write for the post tonight. (yup on the way home from the mall – I told you it was a long drive!) At first I was going to write about what I did today and the title of the post was going to be called ‘Selfish’ Then I started to think about the whole senior citizen comment and decided to have this topic of taking time for yourself not as a selfish comment but as one of my top 5 life lessons. I mean if we don’t take some time for ourselves, how can we enjoy everything else? So why is it so hard to take some time without thinking of it being selfish? I have no idea but I think it’s something that I’ll be working on the next 55 years.
So that’s my list. Well anyway for today. I’m sure it’s going to change as the years change but like I said, I had about an hour to think about it on the way home tonight and it was kinda interesting to see what actually made it to the top 5.
So Happy Birthday to me and here’s to many more adventures in the next 55 years!!
BSue