As happens every year on March 4th, today marks the beginning of my annual trip around the sun. While each year has its own opportunities for wonder and amazement, this is an especially important one personally. Should I be so lucky, I’ll turn 70 on March 4, 2025. Oh my. . .

March 4th has an interesting history. Until 1936, this was the day for presidential inaugurations in the U.S. Lawmakers chose that date because it was the one on which, in 1789, the Constitution went into effect. It was on this date in 1865 that Abraham Lincoln gave what many consider his greatest speech. In a short 703 words with the famous last paragraph — “with malice toward none with charity for all” — he provided the nation with a timeless and brilliant example “of his moral and rhetorical genius.”

March 4th is also known as “Do Something Day,” the only date that is also a command. My dear mother, it seems, was acting in the spirit of the day when she delivered me into this world.

I’ve used recent birthdays to take the time to stop and pay attention. Some important lessons are slowly revealed as one gets older, such as the realization that we spend a lifetime letting go. Sometimes grudgingly, at other times willingly, we may let go of a job, a career, a relationship, a house, a friendship, a community, or a child who leaves for college or other pursuits. It could be seen as preparation for this next stage of life.

Oliver Burkeman tells us of the paradox of limitations, suggesting that the more one tries to manage time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more one let’s go, confronting the facts of finitude — working with them, rather than against them — the more “productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.”

We’ll only truly live the life we’re given when we accept the fact that we won’t live forever, when we let go of the world’s preconceptions of what makes a successful life and understand that there is simply no cure for being human.

In times past I rushed through to-do lists that I’ll never complete, trying to hold onto things where I should let go, increasing the anxiety that is an all-too-common feature of 21st century living. This year I’ve been noticing the value of slowing down in order to see the wonder around us, to focus on my place and calling in life, and — simply — to enjoy the ride. It is a process, but I have also come to understand that any sustainable change comes from within. To help me with that change, I’ve turned to sources I haven’t always appreciated.

The Word in the Wilderness (2014) by Malcolm Guite features a poem for each day of Lent. The season in which we traditionally reorient ourselves, slow down, and recover from distractions is also a good time to change the very way we read. Guite, in this thoughtful forty-day journey, suggests poetry is a good tool to achieve that change. “Poetry asks us to be savoured, it requires us to slow down, it carries echoes, hints at music, summons energies that we will miss if we are simply scanning. In this way poetry brings us back to older ways of reading and understanding both the Word and the World.”

Reading poetry has long been a hit-or-miss proposition for me. But I realize that in the hands of writers such as the great Irishman Seamus Heaney, poetry — much like prayer — can be “banquet, music, journey, and conversation.”

Guite also suggests another way of looking at the idea of letting go. In his reflection to the beautiful poem The Bright Field by the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, he speaks of the gospel paradox,

. . . about losing to find, giving away to gain, giving everything away only to find it given back in a new and more beautiful form . . . it is not about giving up for its own sake; it is about making room for something wonderful.

Reading poetry — like retirement in general — requires some humility on my part. With poetry, I have to concentrate, still grasping only a piece of what the poet intended. In retirement we are no longer on the pedestal where our job placed us. As a retired person “I am just that — an older member of our society. Sometimes I am respected as an older person. Other times, I am taken for granted or even dismissed. Being retired is a slice of humble pie.“

Perhaps, on this birthday, I’m letting go of some long-held hubris as well, to find something more wonderful.

Wherever your marching takes you, enjoy the day.

More to come . . .

DJB