Using Birthdays to Remember to Love Those in Your Life That Much More Strongly?

If you’re like me, birthdays are largely more difficult than fun. It’s humbling saying goodbye to another great year of your life. But it’s also a chance to love those around you even more strongly. This Saturday I’m sharing a new tradition with my favorite person! It’s Donut Quest. When we travel to big cities together, Becki and I spend a morning hunting for some of the best donuts around. Bonus when we can squeeze in brunch at places like the charming Copper Hen! Our visit to downtown Dallas started this. Now we have a birthday celebration in the Cities.

I am happy I can start new traditions like Donut Quest with someone I love. I dreaded the idea of being alone when I went through a divorce in 2020. The idea that I was losing traditions built over ten years with someone devastated me. I was giving up trips to Port Aransas, Texas. We would build campfires on the beach in late fall to celebrate Thanksgiving. We would watch our dog jump endlessly and fearlessly into the Gulf water—water that always felt more like bath water than deep water. There were traditions like making homemade mead together. There were traditions like attending Baylor football games and cheering so hard our throats hurt the next day.

I have discovered recently that the best traditions do not always lie in the last. They are perhaps ones we have always wanted to start and now can. I can now start traditions with the beautiful woman in my life, traditions that only lived in my imagination. Perhaps this is what getting older is all about. A year older is an invitation to stop putting off traditions we want to start. Build them with the people in your life who deserve to be loved more strongly. Go on your Donut Quests. 

It is also not about simply letting go of past traditions. There can be room for semblances of the old. Becki and I have visited beaches together. I shared many Hawaii beaches with her. We also shared the experience (though failed haha) of making chokecherry wine. In lieu of Baylor games, we are visiting the Guthrie Theater this weekend to watch a production of Hamlet. I will not have to stand the whole time and cheer—thankfully. I don’t miss having sore feet. All this to say, a year older means hanging even closer to the people we love in order to share the many traditions that make life worth living—life fixed firmly, peacefully, and gratefully in the today and the tomorrow, not the past.