Birthday Lamentation

I think it was Confucius who made a cruel statement that if a man hasn’t accomplished anything significant at age fifty, it would be pretty hopeless for him to ever achieve anything with his life. It’s depressing to be reminded of this on my birthday. I turned fifty-six a few days ago.

I spent the entire time waiting for something great to happen during my birthday, but nothing occurred except a phone call from Rob and by the time Kathy came home from work, I was getting a little depressed. I always knew that I wasn’t all that important of a person to other people, and the truth was again confirmed. Nobody thought about me during the day except my loved ones, which wasn’t quite enough for me, I suppose.

Why wasn’t it enough? I asked. I guess there is indeed a great discrepancy between how I perceive myself and how other people perceive me, and the key to my mental well-being and personal happiness is to narrow that gap as much as possible. If I considered myself unimportant, I probably wouldn’t mind as much how insignificant other people deem me to be. Our self-perception does determine the way we react to people’s perception of us.

Why did it matter, really? After a hearty meal at River Smith’s I was golden again, and a couple of presents from my wife gave my morale a big boost. We tend to become dejected if we focus too much on ourselves. The key for us, it appears to me, to become helpful to others is to become forgetful of ourselves. As I age, I have become more and more aware of my limitations as a man and my inability to achieve greatness in life. But there are still a lot of small things that I can still do to achieve smallness – true greatness. Emily Dickinson was on target when she wrote:

“If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

May this sentimental little poem serve as a reminder for all of us - We can still achieve true greatness by doing small things for other people, as my father-in-law used to do: He went through his church directory everyday and sang “happy birthday” to the ones who might have been forgotten by the entire world except one.