Birthdays are good anchors.

It’s easy to remember how I was all past birthdays. There must be a special place in the brain that’s dedicated only to recalling them and the circuitry is only activated on your birthday. Even though the day itself is arbitrary since the calendar is a construct, the feelings and thoughts it evokes are very poignant. 

As I’ve grown I’ve become much more appreciative of everything around me. People reach out to wish me a happy birthday and want to celebrate with me, they don’t have to. My parents send me flowers and balloons, they don’t have to. They choose to. To be a part of that choice, knowing that I create a strong enough impetus being that I’m deserving in people’s eyes of that additional effort encourages me to be a better person. Every year I feel I progress forward towards happiness and fulfillment and when I envision this feeling, I see this warm light expanding around me incrementally. My brain has been rewired to notice the positive, to understand that this life isn’t to be taken for granted nor are the amazingly kind and generous people I’ve been fortunate enough to have in my life. To know how I started, the darkness around me- it’s nice to notice this natural progress and I’m thankful to be aging and growing wiser. 

I’m aware of how much darkness there is left, and how much more space my circle can fill, but for once I can say that that’s not taking precedence in my view. I’m only focusing on the radiance. Rayonnement. 

There are about 2 people that I always run into. Both, from the time I was very young, somehow stuck out to me even before I knew them. Drawn to them in an inexplicable way from the start.

Years later I still see them around, often. Whether it’s randomly in Paris at the same time (chance situations that are eerie such as being in the exact same train car going from the airport after having missed a flight, or knowing mutual friends that are so unrelated in the whole scheme of things and finding each other after a few years of both travelling all over the world) or in New York, randomly finding out that we live on the same blocks. Reasonably, they must just be out a lot, but unreasonably, we do find ourselves in similar circumstances frequently for the past few years that it almost seems a sign. Yet none of us have gotten to deeply know each other- it’s very surface level encounters, but very many. We’ve gotten so used to seeing each other all the time and never in situations where it’s to be expected that we’ve never reached out, despite having each others’ phone numbers with all different area codes- because there’s a mutual trust in that we’ll be in the same situation again. Faith in our affinity. 

We somehow reverberate the same frequencies. I do believe that perhaps you do have strong attractions to these people or you have similar uncannily similar thoughts to these people at the exact same time- you’re on the same plane of the collective unconscious. I wonder what is there to find out if I were to really get to know them. That’s my mission these coming weeks. There’s something to find out, I can feel it. Recurrent run ins are getting tighter and tighter for both. If you could plot these on a chart, lately our collisions are like what the seismograph churns out when an earthquake is about to hit.

And yet some people, you NEVER ever run into. Feel it out next time- with those people it doesn’t feel as natural, or intuitive in retrospect. Perhaps those people you do get closer to because you are forced to reach out, and you choose to see them because you want to. What’s odd is I’ve never thought about this before, and I think about everything- only because it always felt so natural until it finally occurred to me at this very moment. It was marinating in the back of my mind all this time.