On December 20th, 2021 I officially started celebrating my 50th year. For over a decade I have deliberately celebrated the whole year on the fives (my 40th year, my 45th year, my 50th year…you get the idea) complete with a theme and all. To understand why I began this experiment you have to go back to a curb in the suburbs of Portland, OR in May of 2009.

I was visiting my dear friend Liz Colligan and we were sitting on the curb watching her boys play. I started to “share” (a.k.a. complain, whine, bemoan) about the challenges of getting older when my life didn’t look the way I thought it would. One of Liz’s best gifts was her ability to speak truth with searing eloquence and love all at once. And in that moment she lit into me.

For context, I came to visit and sit with my friend because she knew, we all knew, that her wrestling with breast cancer was coming to an end even if wasn’t quite done yet. There were no more treatments, no more options. And she said to me in that moment that she would give anything to grow old.

To watch her boys grow up.

And right there on that curb, while my heart broke for the loss I then only anticipated fully knowing, I vowed I was done complaining about getting older. I was going to figure out how to be content with, and maybe one day even celebrate, whatever my life held in the moment.

So began this grand experiment of challenging the assumptions of what I thought my life was supposed to look like. I celebrated my 40th year by doing things I had never done. That first experiment was almost all discipline, with only slivers of joy and growing slipping in through the cracks.

I celebrated my 45th year spending time with people who were dear to me. That year was filled with really hard things (my brother’s cancer got dramatically worse, a job I loved came to an abrupt and unexpected end…). And yet.

And yet it was a year filled with dear ones who loved me extravagantly and beyond reason. It was filled with growing and letting go and finding a deep rootedness. And it was filled with joy.

For my 50th year, I decided I would celebrate by saying yes to every adventure that came my way, big or small. And it has been the best experiment so far! The specific adventures were awesome. But learning that there is still possibility and the unexpected, in the company of dear ones, has been a gift I didn’t even know to anticipate. There has been joy and fun and solitude and community.

And there is hope. Hope that this is just the beginning. Hope that I am continuing to become a more authentic, joyful, kind, open, brave version of the person I’m meant to be (see the caterpillar blog for more on this). I can see that woman sitting on the curb full of angst and grief over what wasn’t going to be. And there has been loss and hard, hard things over the years in between. But there is becoming and growing and adventure even so. And I am learning, even still, to count it joy to grow.

To grow older, grayer, wiser.

To grow. To become. To hope.