Cheerful Birthday, kid.

52 years around the sun.

Life is short looking back, long looking forward, like flowing gently down a stream. Row, row, row your boat. Having a baby, this year, has reminded me of the eternity we are born out of, the early years of watching and feeling and experiencing pre-language, of being loved unconditionally and looking at all this world with a smile, with curiosity, with an utter lack of self-consciousness.

Life is a bubble, Buddhism constantly reminds us. There’s no point to life, as Ginsberg put it, but to be of service, to help others. It’s all a dream, otherwise. A drunken dumbshow, as he put it.

But caring matters. Helping matters. Waking up matters. I’m riddled with faults—this year has been humbling and awful in so many ways, magical and new in so many others…but my faults remind me to be humble, and my joys remind me to celebrate boldly. As Pema put it, or Trungpa Rinpoche, if we can keep the sadness and pain of suffering in our hearts, and at the exact same time the vision of enlightened society, of goodness or wholesomeness, in our hearts—than we can do the little things fully. The little things make up all of life itself. The little things are not a sideshow—they are the show.

If I’ve ever known you and loved you or liked you or laughed or cried with you, thank you. I miss you. I appreciate you. I wish I could remember everything and watch it like a movie. Especially childhood, those days lost largely to the mists of time but still so clear in my mother’s and some of my friends’ memories. I remember snippets, of course, but not a linear or chronological parade of memories that might make up an autobiography.

So I’m 52. So who cares. I’m not sure I do. I feel 30. Though my knee’s been hurting all year, I’m active as hell and never give it rest. I never give myself rest: I work nights and baby by day. I take care of my family and have gone through a move that is endless, still, in its complexity and tiresome tasks.

I miss my community, my sangha, my home, my mountains, my gaddamn favorite cafe. But life pushes us where it likes, sometimes, and mistakes are made and those mistakes, as a sangha friend pointed out today, turn into good things as we go forward if we are honest and we practice meditation and come back to the present.

And for some that’s a big If, but for me, I’m grateful to have grown up in Buddhism, and have had plenty of time to practice it, to be bored by it, to be curious about it, to marinate in it. I hope to have plenty more.

PS: what I’d like for my 52nd birthday: most independent media has been smothered by Big Tech, but Big Social. Please keep Elephant alive and thriving by reading it. By subscribing to it. By getting our newsletter. Those three things will keep us rocking and serving through these troubled times, able to offer a light of community and wisdom in these too-often dark days.