My 71st Birthday
I’m celebrating the dawn of my 72nd year sitting at a jungle resort in the pouring rain. What? Yep, I set out from home at about 6.20 a.m in the dawn light, you know that wonderful time between night and day. When I woke at 4 a.m the rain was bucketing down but I was optimistic that it would stop at 6. It did, so I put on my shorts and walking shoes, grabbed a 50,000 IDR note ( for coffee) put my earphones on, fired up Spotify and set off down our gang towards the temple that sits at the beginning of my morning ridge walk through the jungle. All clear, no rain so I was quite confident that it wouldn’t start up again. How wrong can a man be! About 15 minutes in the rain started again and got heavier and heavier untilI I almost turned around. Then I thought “screw it, this is a bloody adventure all in itself. A perfect way to begin my birthday “. Needless to say I got drenched but at the same time there was something liberating about walking up a mountain path in the tropics with the warm rain hitting and drenching my skin.
So I’m half way now, almost finished my coffee. Feeling great and anticipating a fabulous day. I even feel some endorphins streaming through my veins, that feeling of satisfaction, hope and happiness that I find myself perpetually striving for.
It’s been 25,933 days since that fateful hot Summer morning when I was born in a small hospital in Toorak. What a wonderful life I have had. I haven’t set the world on fire in any significant way but at the same time I feel that my presence has overall had a more positive effect on mankind than a negative one. I am happy with that.
Have I squandered time? Have I passed over opportunities? Could things have been different? Sure. But I don’t think I would change a thing about my life, maybe that’s not 100% for sure but to do that would mean that the present reality would be different. Anyway, regret and blame are shitty states to be in and hold you back, stuck in some earlier point that no longer exists apart from as a fragile image that you carry around with you.
What matters now is simply that, NOW. What is to come and the good deeds that I can potentially pull off are going to be based on vigilante mindfulness of the present and a sense of personal ethics, knowledge, clarification, understanding, acceptance and compassion. My goal is to savour every moment. All of them. The glory, the challenges, the peace, the epiphanies, the satisfaction, the achievements, the creativity, the craziness and the spontaneous reactions to what life dishes out to me.
I’m feeling particularly good today, full of energy, full of hope, truly excited about each moment that I will experience. There’s more to learn, more to realise, more to achieve but I’m happy with the journey that I have walked since that hot February day almost 38 million minutes ago.
Sunday Night
We arrived at Starfish Blu restaurant at the W Hotel in Seminyak just before noon and received our complimentary champagnes. I obviously wasn’t going to drink mine so Georgie and Finn shared it. We‘ve been here twice before. It’s a popular Sunday Buffet that has a huge range of food placed around the restaurant which faces the ocean at Seminyak. Today was a grey and windy day so the waves were angry and choppy but it was still pretty good being next to the ocean. We ate slowly but consistently for the next 4 hours or so but I have to be honest, I was pretty full after the first couple of plates. It doesn’t matter as this is one of those things that we only do a couples of times each year and I didn’t go too over the top although I did eat carbs and sugar which has resulted in me feeling blown up and bloated this evening. We had a pretty good time, lots of talking, laughter, taking photos and I even got a big happy birthday song sung by the staff which was a bit like a South Korean mass wedding because there were several birthdays happening today.
We arrived back in Penestanan around 5.30 p.m. Georgie and I came straight back to the villa and Finn went to the little convenience store at the top of out gang. Christ knows what’s going on but with 5 minutes he arrived back and informed us that he had slipped again walking down the gang and had slipped on his dud knee. This put a dampener on the rest of the night unfortunately. He’s OK but he has grazed the knee and possibly undone some of the work that the bone healer has already done. Thank goodness that we are seeing him again tomorrow morning and then doing HBOT on Tuesday.
So that’s my birthday. That magic 5252 day. I’m pretty pleased by how the day turned out overall but learned a lesson that other people’s goals and condition certainly has an effect on me.
