My Birthday, Again and Again
By: Lynn Zimmering
Tags: Joy, Birthday, Aging, Immortality, Eating Disorders

How much fun is it to approach NINETY?

This week I celebrated my 89th birthday. In many ways, it was shocking, and in other ways, a big nothing. I reveled in the attention I received but was slightly relieved when it was over. One achieves a sense of agelessness by living one day after another without the interference of birthday celebrations. Instead, these celebratory events act as reminders of our mortality. Every year, closer to the end.

However, there are different ways to look at birthdays.

Birthdays can be markers of the marvelous things that have happened in our lives so far. They can be reminders of the increased wisdom and empathy developed in us over the years and to be thankful we have experienced joy and beauty. Our friendships grow and become more precious.

Think about this! Suppose you were a perennial plant ranging from a strawberry or a potato to a willow tree; you could produce clones by vegetative reproduction (according to Wikipedia) and become potentially immortal.

Not that I’d rather be a potato — or even a couch potato.

So that leaves us with the common issue of aging. Aging is the process of becoming older. The term refers to humans, many other animals, fungi, and old jokes!.

Successful aging, a concept from the 1950s, describes three criteria, 1)freedom from disease and disability, 2)high cognitive and physical functioning, and 3)social and productive engagement.

If these criteria were the only way to measure successful maturity, it would sink most of us. I have Type 1 Diabetes, which eliminates freedom from disease, high physical functioning isn’t happening to me these days, and social engagements are finally returning after the pandemic.

In our culture, children learn the privileges of celebrating birthdays. We gleefully absorb our entitlement for special attention, gifts, and parties and eliminating some of our rules for living.

When I worked for WW, folks that had gained weight since their last weigh-in might explain that their birthdays had occurred. So, they celebrated it with a big dinner. That was fine. However, as time went on, the celebration grew to the “Birthday Weekend.” Then, it morphed into “Birthday Week.”

The last straw was the “Birthday Month.”

What happened to their journey to better health? These folks were allowing themselves to relax, eat whatever they wanted in whatever amounts satisfied them, partied frequently, maybe stopped exercising for an entire month. They were tossing away their progress toward better health — all hard work abandoned during Birthday month to get satisfaction from over-eating. After all, they qualified, simply by being the Birthday celebrant!

Getting older can mean different things to different people. To my friends of a similar age, we all agree to one basic fact, which is,

We are too old to deny ourselves anything!

So, don’t despair about aging — instead, enjoy each birthday, with hopes of many, many more. Keep the over-eating to a minimum and reward yourself for having survived another year (this past one was grueling) by doing something you have always wanted to do but never got around to or buying an object you have always wanted to own.

Happy Birthday to all the May babies and the rest of you folks, too.