Turning 44

For better or worse, I have once again completed another trip around the sun and have hit the magic number of 44. Double digits is always a fun number. I don’t know why. There’s just something bouncy and fun about it.

I would love to have a bouncy and fun 44. I’m not entirely sure what that would look like, but I think it’s something to work for. Maybe.

I admit to being off to a rough start. I had Covid for Christmas and I spent New Year’s Eve/Day blowing my nose. An unfortunate incident involving one of the cats and a glass of wine has slowly made the laptop I bought at the beginning of last year unusable. So, at the beginning of this year I bought yet another new laptop in a fit of frustration and now we all need to cross our fingers that this pretty shiny lasts longer than its predecessor. Trust me, neither I nor my credit card are thrilled with this turn of events, but I gotta do what I gotta do to stay in business.

So, yeah, I closed out 43 a lot harsher than I’d planned, which makes me cautious going into 44.

Good thing I’d already planned on taking baby steps.

This is part of The Remarkable Life Deck work I started last year when I turned 43. It’s a 10 year plan after all, and surprisingly I haven’t gotten bored and wandered off, so here I am at 44 still working on it. Last year, I spent a good chunk of time off and on working through the deck and and answering the questions as honestly as possible. Towards the end of the year, I looked at everything I wrote down and came up with a few baby steps I could take to work my way towards the ideals I’d detailed in the journal.

My idea for 44 is to make it a year of baby steps. Every month, I will take conscious baby steps toward my ultimate goals. I have no idea if this is exactly how you’re supposed to use the deck. The way Debbie Millman describes it is that when she did this, she found things happening as if by magic. I get how manifestation and visualization work, but I also believe that those things don’t happen unless you do things to signal to the Universe that you want them and that you’re ready for them.

These will be my signals. Big ol’ flairs sent up on a monthly basis. I think that’s reasonable. And I don’t think it has to be a drag. It sounds very dry and boring, like doing chores, but I don’t think that it has to be or that it will be. After all, the point of this is to work my way into the life that I want. That’s not dull. There’s joy in that. So, naturally there will be joy in the baby steps.

Maybe it’ll be how I make 44 fun and bouncy after all.