Your birthday is the beginning of your own personal new year.
Your first birthday was a beginning, and each new birthday is
a chance to begin again, to start over, to take a new grip on life…
It is time to consider the wisdom of Socrates:
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” It is a time to reevaluate
your past as a guide to your future.
It is a time to toss old hatreds, resentments, grudges and fears into
the wastebasket of life: a time to forgive and forget.
It is a time to list the things you have left undone and to do something
about them; the visits you have failed to make, the words unspoken,
the letters unwritten, the task unfinished.
It is a time to dust off your dreams and shine up your ideas.
It is a time to browse through the precious old books that have meant
the most to you that you may discover illumination phrases and sentences
to light your pathway into the future.
It is a time to rededicate your life to those things which are enduring,
recognizing with William James that “ the great use of life is to spend it on something that will outlasts it.”
It is a time to resolve to add life to your years, for as Phillip James Bailey points out.
“he most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.”
Written by Wilfred Peterson in 1960.
