As of today I have walked this earth for 28 years.

I’d like to think that by this time I have learned a lot of life’s more important lessons, and paid most of my dues. There will be others to come, I know, but the hardest ones are past. At least, I hope they are.

Over the years I have distilled the things that have most value to me - family, friends, love, laughter, respect, trust. Of these, not one is something I possess by right but each is something shared by another person - a rare privilege.

I have been taught, even before I turned the magic age of 18, to know the difference between a love that burns like a raging bush fire, and love that slowly burns in the hearth.

While the first consumes, the other nourishes. The first dies soon after its heated peak, the other stays constant and even its embers still give off warmth.

It is a quiet kind of love, this other one. There are no cymbals crashing in the background while it burns, and more often than not, no trumpets either.

I have known the first kind of love, and at times its devouring fire ignites me. But I treasure, perhaps more deeply, the second kind of love that is always there - like the ever-present tide that always ebbs and flows beneath the ocean’s surface, like air that seeps into my lungs even when I don’t make a conscious effort to breath.

I am thankful for the first kind, for its excitement and exhilaration. But I am more thankful for the second kind, for its sweet sustaining strength.

To my family and friends, thank you for making the last 28 years (or 15, or 10, or 5 or 2, depending on when I met you :-)), wonderful years of learning, love and laughter.

And to my dearest, dearest Markie, Ga, thank you.

Posted under Navel-Gazing