#32 - My Most Honest Birthday

Birthdays can be awkward.  You receive so much external love that you are unsure what exactly to do with it :-)  Love is good.  Enjoy love.  Allow it to sink all the way in, and give the world as much love as you can.  Love does not need a measure assigned to it.  This means you can give more and more. This means you can receive more and more.  You do not have to give love to someone with the same measure you receive it.  Love needs no balancing scale.  It is a force much bigger than us.  It will and cannot be tamed.  May it abound.

However, birthdays can still be awkward.  People bestow hope and well wishes upon your coming year. Throughout the day, you have to reconcile the overwhelming amount of hope received from the outside, with the amount of hope you actually have on the inside.  This can be problematic to those of you who are truly honest.

There was a time when I was turning 26 and 27, where I truly felt I was moving from strength to strength.  The amount of hope I received from people could not come close to the amount of hope I felt on the inside.  Every birthday was just confirmation that I was on the right track.  I guess you could say I was "Humble, with a little bit of Kanye." :)  When I turned 27, I felt a sense of hope that was all consuming.  It was crazy.  It felt so good.  I felt my life was doing what it was supposed to.  I felt I was standing right where I was supposed to be.  I was ok.

On my 32nd birthday, the deep confidence that once was simply does not look the same.  Instead of hiding behind an artistic swagger, I choose to expose it.  I want to speak on it because I think most of us feel the need to hide.  We build up walls, Instagram accounts, and Facebook posts to hide.  Hiding in our culture is very easy.  You flash a few smiles, say a few nice things, greet people with respect, and the world will accept you at face value.  You need not go deeper because that gets messy.  No one respects messy right?  We only accept pristine.  I do not feel the same hope and the same strength as before.  My version of hope and strength are different now.  It is subtle.  It has layers that I cannot seem to articulate that well.  It has ebbs and flows that seem to be separated out of time in the way we interpret time.

Yesterday, as I turned 32, I felt hopeful.  But this hope was completely different from the hope of birthdays from 5 and 6 years ago.  It was a hope that did not rely on my feelings.  It was a hope that cannot be measured by bursts of confidence and self-assurance.  It was a hope that did not need fixed outcomes to look forward to.  It was a hope that was already set in place.  Hope is not hope because you feel it.  Hope is not hope because you feel exuberant from it.  Hope has a much more defiant characteristic.  Hope has more to do with a reality that is greater than the sum totals of our emotions. Now this is something I can be hopeful about!  If I do not have to rely on myself to generate hope, then I can move freely and hope against all odds.  I am free to hope against hope.  I am free to fix my eyes, ears, mind, and soul towards something that is not generated in me, although is made powerful and effective within me.

The hope from previous years was one that based success and fulfillment on things done from me. The hope now is based on things that can be done in me.  You are either the Source, or a Vessel.  We can often get the 2 confused even if we do not mean to.  What is the consistency of our hope?  What sort of hope are we banking on?  Are there layers to our hope, or is it a feeling?  There is a greater narrative that is far deeper than the story of our successes and dreams.  There is a truer picture of reckless joy that reaches greater heights than all of our desires put together.  This has been the starting point of #32.  This is the Great Hope - that the mosaic of our misinterpreted dreams, downfalls, tears, love, disappointments, failures, and  relationships, will all be put together to point to what truly, truly, truly, counts.  I cannot tell you what my goals are for year #32.  I can only tell you that I begin with a hope that is not a feeling.

Happy Birthday to us all - love, Jeevo.