Birthday reflections

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Good morning bread friends!

I sat down to write this at the end of the day on my birthday this Wednesday.

I just turned 40. What a wild thing to say.

Personally, I'm not a big New Year's resolution type of person. But birthdays (especially this one apparently) can cause me to do a great deal of reflection.

I am a person who routinely establishes big dreams, and then proceeds to put a lot on my plate as I pursue various goals. As the clock turned to a new decade I was tempted to toil over whether or not I was accomplishing all that I felt that I'd like to be accomplishing in life.

For my birthday, I took the day off work. My first inclination was to use the time to sit down and map out the next steps toward various personal/professional goals. Instead of doing that… I only did things that felt explicitly like self-care. Perhaps ironically, it felt like I had one of the most "accomplished" days that I've had in a long time.

The highlights of my 40th birthday were - getting some physical activity in, sitting by a pond listening to music, enjoying a long phone call with an old friend, going for a long walk, spending time playing with my kids without distractions, listening intentionally while Melissa told me about her day, visiting my favorite coffee shop and sandwich shop, and protecting time to reflect on my thoughts and feelings.

It was a beautiful day.

And as I look back, it was a beautiful decade.

This was the decade that I did a bunch of fantastic things:

• Spent the entire decade married to my favorite person

• Became a parent, which is teaching me about a new depth of love and new source of purpose in life

• Spent several years serving my neighbors as an elected official

• Discovered a tremendously delightful hobby of making sourdough bread, which has introduced me to a new community of interesting and deeply passionate people, and led to the development of this community and finding new ways to serve my neighbors

• Kept in touch with (and laughed and cried with) a few old friends who have known me for 20+ years

• Invested in deepening my friendship with my two little brothers

• Established several new friendships that I fully intend to continue cherishing in the upcoming decade

When I sat down to write this letter, I didn't know what would come out. It is remarkable that when I think about the top-tier things that I look back on with fondness and gratitude from this year, they all revolve around relationships. Lately, I spend more mental energy in a given week thinking about the pursuit of "success". So this day of rest, and this practice of sitting down just now to write down my reflections is remarkably useful. None of the top-shelf memories from this decade were related to "striving" or perceptible "accomplishments".

It's almost like... all the research surrounding human health and happiness points to relationships – just the same as ancient wisdom literature has for thousands of years. 😎🙃🤪🤗

Cool. Cool.

Welp! If you buy bread this week, I hope you get a chance to share some of it with people who you care about. 😎🥰  

Cheers,
Mo Cheeks