Boy, annual reviews are depressing.

I’ve never liked the yearly MOT, ever since it was my only trudge over to Oxford every 12 months as part of my shared-care arrangement with Northampton Paediatric Unit (not an uncommon arrangement for PWCF, especially children), when it was marked with endless hors of waiting around and pointless questions from a doctor who you see but once a year but spends their brief meeting with you asking the sort of intimate question you’d struggle to find the courage – as a child/teenager – to answer your own doctor about.

Seriously, how many 14 year-old kids are going to sit in a consulting room with their Dad and answer anything but “No” when the doctor says, “do you smoke”?  Obviously, I never have, but there are those – even with CF – who do, and it is critical to their ongoing care that the doctors are aware of something like this.  Asking in front of Dad is not the way to go about finding out.

As the year’s have gone by, and the process has moved from being an annual schlep to Oxford to being just another clinic appointment with my adult team at the Churchill – and one that’s marked by a good deal less waiting and a good deal more friendliness – it’s taken on a paradoxically much more unpleasant feel to it.

If progress were marked on a chart – and with many areas of CF, it actually is – the over-riding theme of annual reviews is to watch the graph slip-sliding ever so slowly downwards in an ever-decreasing mountainside style.

This year, I suppose it reached it’s nadir – there isn’t a whole lot lower to go, and compared to last year, things look pretty (‘scuse the French) shite.  It’s hard to stay upbeat and positive when you’re looking back at a set of results which at the time were immensely disappointing, but for which now you’d give your proverbial eye teeth.

(By the way – can anyone tell me what eye teeth actually are and why they’re called that?  It’s dead confusing.  Answers on a postcard, kudos as a prize…)

There are moments of levity in the experience, though, things which I suppose I must cling to, although all of them come firmly in the category of “if you don’t laugh you’ll cry”.

Take the psychological survey, for instance, an 8 page document quizzing you on how CF affects your quality of life (or QOL as they like to put it), with the kind of inane multiplle choice answer boxes like A Lot, Not Much, A Bit, Not Really.

“Does CF affect your day-to-day life?”,  “Does CF prevent you from doing the things you want to do?”, “Does CF affect your relationships?”.  A monkey could answer these for me right now.

What did make my nurses laugh, though, was my minor fit of pique whereby I simply crossed out the entire section devoted to “social life and socialising”.  I wish.

I now have to wait a few weeks and head back for an ultrasound scan and then to see my doctors, who will have all of my results and can sit down and take me through them.  Can’t wait for that day – it should be a barrel of laughs.

Anyway, I’ve had enough of bleating about the awfulness of annual reviews, my chest and my life at the moment – I’m going to go and plonk myself on the sofa in front of a good movie and forget about everything.  Until I remember it again…

It would appear that my Monday was, in fact, a delayed Sunday (or a British Rail Sunday, as I prefer to call it), bringing with it as it did all of the slowed-down, energy-less deflation that I was expecting to get as a hangover from my Brummy exertions.

I haven’t been feeling completely rubbish, but it was certainly a LOT harder to get up and out of bed this morning than it has been for the last week or so.

A good session of physio once I had managed to get up and about seemed to sort things out, but I took the day very easy anyway, spending most of it on the sofa watching the extras on my King Kong DVD (have been totally addicted to the superb production diaries) and getting through 3 episodes of the first season of Entourage, a show which managed to sneak under my radar but which is brilliantly my kind of thing, following as it does the path of a Hollywood actor and his close-knit bunch of friends. Aspirational TV, I guess you could call it.

Once my batteries were sufficiently DVD-charged, I did manage to plonk my butt down in the study and get some work done, reviewing pages for the new issue of CF Talk and responding to some emails which have been hanging around for my attention for a while.

Also had to tune in to Richard & Judy this evening to catch the ever-wonderful Emily turning on the charm for Mr & Mrs daytime (or is it prime-time?) TV, along with her charming and incredibly open mother, whom I like to call Mrs T. Using footage from the various interviews they’ve done with Emily over years, pre- and immediately post-transplant, I have yet to see a more convincing advert for the benefits of organ donation that seeing the contrast in Emily in those films.

The thought of the immense and immeasurable ways in which my life could change with just one phone call is at once hugely exciting and tremendously saddening. It is impossible to see into the future and to know what lies in store for me, but the thought of such amazing, intangible possibilities sitting so close but so very far from reach is a hard one to reconcile in one’s mind.

It’s a process in which I feel like a terrified passenger, willing the runaway train to stay on track and ease into the station set for new life, whilst all the while knowing that one little bump will send it hurtling off the rails.

How do you live your life from day-to-day with something like that hanging over your head? I’m not sure even I know, except to say that if I wasn’t living it, then there’d be no point waiting for the transplant, I guess.

So, for those of you who are in touch with the Big Man Upstairs, now’s the time to get on your knees, bow your heads or do whatever comes most naturally to you when you pray and ask Him to bless me with a second chance. And for those of you who don’t believe, well, maybe He’d like to hear from you, too.

Woke up this morning later than I have been – all of 9.30am – fully expecting to feel worse than horrible and was surprise (and delighted) to discover I didn’t.

In fact, I felt as good if not better than I had the previous morning.  No complaints from me on that one.  I was a little bit more chesty than I have been, but I think that’s down to not getting as long a session of physio in last night as I would usually do, largely due to being so shattered from the day.

I’ve spent the day on the sofa doing next to nothing – watched the British Grand Prix and then realised that all through this season I’ve sat and watched races, only to remember with a quarter of the race to go that I really don’t like F1 anymore because it’s so chuffing dull.  When the only time cars overtake each other is when one of them stops for petrol, you know you’ve got a problem with your sport, surely?

I remember the olden days when the cars used to drive quite close together and every now and again one of them would try to get past another one IN A CORNER – oh, the memories.  I still have no idea why I sat through all 60 laps of today’s GP other than using the excuse that I was deliberately trying to do nothing.

My dad has it right – he Sky+’s most of the races, and then zips through them at x6 speed, which is much more interesting.

To break from the sporting tedium, we sat and watched The Queen this evening, which was entertaining, but no where near as grand as it’s been reported to be.  Helen Mirren is outstanding, but the script is INCREDIBLY clunky in the first 10-15 minutes where the filmmakers are clearly working over-time to make sure that all the Americans who want to watch the film are up to speed with how our country works with the monarchy, the Prime Minister and all the rest of our constitutional gubbins.

It’s hideously badly handled, although I suppose the defence would be that it had to be shoe-horned in to make the film make sense to the foreign markets.  I still think there are other ways of doing it, though.

The cast are generally very good, although some veer towards the bad side of impressionism and caricature,  and the idea of a peering into the Royal household at such a difficult time is intriguing, even if some of the scenarios they come up with stretch the bounds of believability a little.

I was worth seeing to see what all the fuss was about, but I wouldn’t rush out to pick myself up a copy (our copy being a lovefilm rental).

Hoping for an early night tonight, although with my brain running the way it does at the moment, I’ll be wide awake again come 8.30 and it’ll take me till midnight to feel sleepy again.

So it turned out that my chest decided not to try any last minute histrionics and I did make it up to Birmingham today.

I’m sure there will be much amusing cross-bloggage between myself, Emily and Emma on the subject, but since I appear to have got here first, I’ll be popping my smug face on. Or possibly reflecting on the fact that they clearly have better things to do with their Saturday nights than sit in front of their computer detailing their day. Ho hum.

Today saw the beginning of National Transplant Week, which runs until next Saturday, and to mark the occasion the Live Life Then Give Life team assembled in Victoria Square in Birmingham to create the world’s biggest Loveheart (you know, those little hard sweets with “Date me” or “Sexy” written in the middle).

The idea was to create a 1 metre wide version, which, when finally calculated, required a massive 70kg of icing, which all had to be rolled out, dyed, plastered together in a neat round shape, then have the heart-shape and letters spelling out the organ donation line phone number placed on top.

Due to the hugely limited reserves of energy I have now, however, most of the fun of the day was off-limits to me, with my arrival timed to coincide with the completion of the finished loveheart around 3pm, when we hoped to have some press along to mark the occasion.

Mum and Dad drove over and collected K and me just after 1pm and we headed up the M1 to Birmingham in really good time, car loaded down with my newly acquired wheelchair, plenty of spare oxygen, a snack-box of energy-boosters and spare bits and pieces like paracetamol, which I’ve found immensely useful in recent weeks for calming hyper-active chest flaring moments.

I have to confess that I was pretty nervous going out of the house today. Things can change so rapidly from moment to moment with my chest at the moment that the prospect of traveling quite so far from the relative comfort and safety of home, where my bed and Neve are always to hand, concerned me. The prospect of getting into difficulties in a car on the motorway filled me with a kind of nervousness I’ve not experienced before and it really threw me off.

That said, it was a really wonderful afternoon – everyone there was so fun and friendly. I saw a few faces I’d met previously at Laughter for Life and met a few people who I’ve only had contact with via email and message boards up to now.

It was fantastic to be out in the open air and having some fun with people, compared to my usual life at the moment of sitting around at home doing hardly anything at all. The daily grind of nebs, physio, more nebs, resting, nebbing, physioing and on and on in a loop is brought into focus by a break from routine like today.

My chest behaved admirably. Once we got home it gave only the mildest of complaints, letting me know that it had done quite enough for the day, thank you very much, but not ranting and raving about it as it sometimes deems necessary.

I’ve been pretty spectacularly tired all evening, but have forced myself to stay awake so I get a good night’s sleep tonight, which I’m now assured of, so I’m going to whisk myself off to hit the hay and catch up on other things tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who helped out today, and to everyone who popped down to say hello. We made an odd sight in the centre of Birmingham, standing over a giant sweet in various random states of hilarity and occasional fits of giggles, but we made contact with a lot of people and passed on the message of organ donation, which is what this week (and our campaign) is all about.

One of the joys of finally being off IVs is not having the alarm blare at 8 o’clock every morning to get you up and out of bed to do your morning dose.  Annoyingly, my body seems to have seen fit to re-set it’s internal clock to keep raising me from my slumber sometime near or just after 8am anyway, as if I’ll miss out on something important if I don’t.  Regardless, it’s still nice not to be woken by an alarm, I suppose.

I had the BBC round today to do an interview for Look East, the local news bulletin for the Anglia region.  It was only a 2-man job, nothing big, with a reporter and a cameraman and took less than an hour from top to tail.

Interestingly, I didn’t feel even a touch of nerves today, which I normally get before any of the interviews I do, so I am forced to assume that my brain and nerve-ometer have come to the conclusion that once you’ve done live Radio 4, taped local news is nothing to be bothered about.

Not that I’m complaining at my head’s somewhat pompous stance – it makes interviews a whole lot easier and less tongue-twisty if you’re not feeling the nerves beforehand.  And in fact today I felt I gave on of the best interviews I’ve done – I covered all the bases clearly and succinctly and gave them lots of material to cut around, depending on what angle they wanted to take.

I was even pretty pleased with the final version which went out on in the 6.30pm programme tonight – it managed to put everything across well and didn’t rely too heavily on the kind of news-package cliche  coverage that usually gets shot for PWCF, although we did have to have the inevitable nebuliser shot.

The rest of the day has been spent trying to chill out and rest up in the hope of making it to Birmingham for the Live Life Then Give Life event in Victoria Square in the afternoon.  It’s frustrating not to know whether I’m going to be able to make it or not yet, but I can’t commit to anything when I have no idea how I’m going to feel from one morning to the next.

Most of the afternoon has been fine, although this evening my chest is feeling a bit tight and grumpy, so it’s anyone’s guess how I’ll be in the morning.  I’m hoping that it’s just a bit of tiredness creeping in and that once Neve takes over the leg-work of breathing for the night, I’ll be set for a trip out tomorrow.  We’ll have to wait and see.

As you may or may not know, next week is National Transplant Week, throughout which lots of various things will be happening to raise awareness of organ donation and suchlike.

Tomorrow morning I’m being interviewed by BBC Look East and the piece should run as part of their 6.30pm main evening news, all things being well, so those of you in the Eastern region, keep your eyes peeled for that.

With luck, I’ll have more media stuff going on throughout the week, too.  The local papers will pick up my story again, I hope, and also perhaps local radio, too.

Nationally, look out for Emily on Richard and Judy during the week, as well as a friend of mine called Robyn who will take Emily’s place on the GM:TV sofa as resident PWCF awaiting transplant – naturally I’d have been up for it, but I’m not a pretty girl, so I think that ruled me out…

For more information on Transplant Week, check out the Transplants in Mind and UK Transplant websites, as well as our very  own Live Life Then Give Life campaign, through which we will be targeting a whole host of local media across the country, and hopefully some national media, too.

So keep your eyes peeled in your local press for pics of attractive young people sporting their Live Life Then Give Life or their I’d Give You One T-shirts – and spread the word about organ donation to all around you.

Earlier this week I sat down with K to show her a film I thought she’d like that I’d caught on TV a while back and just picked up on DVD.

The Gathering Storm covers the year or so leading up to Winston Churchill’s re-appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1935, during which time he tries in vain to convince his Parliamentary colleagues that Germany is re-arming itself for a war which no one else in Europe is prepared for.

It’s a fantastic film – an HBO/BBC co-production for television, not cinema release – with a marvelous central performance from Albert Finney and an eye-watering supporting cast.

What struck me, on watching it back again, though, was the reminder of how Churchill struggled with what the doctors called, “a certain melancholia” and what his family – most notably his wife, his adored Clemmie – called his Black Dog. Nowadays, of course, it would be called depression and he’d be on all manner of pills and psychological couches to come to terms with things, but this isn’t the time or the place for a detailed break-down of my personal feelings towards today’s current epidemic of depression.

I have, of late, felt myself under attack from the very same Black Dog as afflicted Churchill, I feel.

The analogy to a dog is remarkably accurate – it carries a life and a will of its own and it can come and go as quickly as the summer sun behind the clouds at Wimbledon. Like a dog, it can be docile and quiet one minute and turn unutterably savage the next: a constant threat hanging over you, but with no indication when or how long the next surge will come.

Today was very much a Black Dog Day. It seems at the moment that whenever my chest is less than perfect… hmm, no, that’s not the right way to put it, given that “perfect” is something my chest hasn’t been since my earliest years… but whenever my chest is a little worse than it was yesterday, or whenever I feel slightly more under the weather than I have been for the few days previously, the Dog attacks with a savagery I’ve never before experienced.

Yesterday was my last day of IVs for this course – normally a time of great celebration and a chance to enjoy a long, hot, refreshing shower (something I can’t do with my port accessed, so I have to settle for half-baths which don’t get my shoulder wet). This time round, however, I feel like I’m losing a crutch which I’ve been leaning and relying on to improve me.

I’ve been so used, over the years, to going down hill, having a course of IVs and pitching out the other end all fine and dandy, it’s an alien feeling to come to the end of a course of IVs as I have the last couple of times and still find my chest almost as clogged up as it was before, albeit with markedly less infection and with much thinner and more “friendly” sputum.

I think there’s a part of my brain which is still convinced that I’m not actually any better at all and that I should still be on the drugs, something which all medical evidence strongly contradicts. It is this nagging centre of the brain which I think is holding the leash for the Black Dog and sees fit to set him free at the merest hint of a down-turn.

I’ve had a few really good days since I arrived back at the flat almost a week ago. I’ve been getting stronger and feeling more upbeat than I have in a long time. So it’s all the more arresting when the Dog attacks as he did today.

As if lost in a cloud of darkness that envelops all around it, I found myself losing touch with myself and veering off down a course of negative thinking that I normally nip in the bud in seconds. And where I sit at the moment, once the cloud does descend, once the Dog has its teeth into me, there’s nothing can be said or done to clear the air or shake it off.

Strangely, the fog I found myself in for most of the afternoon suddenly lifted this evening. I strongly suspect it’s down to a fillip in my physical state, whereby my chest deigned to allow me out of bed without making all kinds of disagreeable noises and causing problems.

What I need to find is something that will disconnect my mind from my body – to keep my mental state separate from that of my physical. Because let’s face it, if I start to bottom out at the first sign of a little physical hurdle, I’m going to be fighting through far, far to many mental battles when I should be focusing all my energy on my physical ones.

Anyone know where I can buy a muzzle?

So I’m back at the flat now, enjoying a wonderful, 2-person existence with K and my own space with everything in easy reach.  (2-person existence meaning K and me, not 2 versions of me in a crazy Jekyll & Hyde kind of way).

Before I left the flat, we’d been trying, ever-so-hard, to sort out our internet connection, which had been thrown into disarray when we discovered that neither my nice new, shiney Mac Pro, nor K’s nice, new, not-quite-so-shiney lap-top with Windows Vista-poo, would work with our current Broadband modem.

Don’t ask me why – it’s some kind of computer conspiracy between Microsoft, Onetel, PC World, Maplins and computer telephone helplines that would take years to unravel if anyone ever bothered to, which they won’t because no one understands enough about things to unravel them enough to make sense of anything to work out who did what to whom and when and why and what.  Ish.

It just doesn’t work.

So, I went out and bought the doofer they told me to buy, thinking I was being very clever and techie and would sort it all out in a flash.

Sadly, the one I bought was, frankly,  poo.  Sometimes in life, you get what you pay for and what I paid for was a cheap piece of rubbish that no one on any helplines had heard of, not even the people on the helpline for the company that made the modem product that I’d bought.

So I took it back.

Fast forward through a month of not being at the flat (see other post) and I arrive back at the flat knowing exactly what I need to get and roaming the internet to find it, order it and get it delivered.

And today, it arrived!

So I leap (stumble) out of bed and run (walk) to the study, throw (plonk) myself down in the chair and busily set about slotting (ramming) cables into the various slots they may or may not fit into.  I do all of this with the authoritarian air of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing.

To my delight, I turn on the computer and nothing explodes.

So, I jump into the software settings gubbins, which I now know inside out having messed around so much trying to make the other lump of rubbish work.  I’m entering long strings of complicated numbers and letters and passcodes – sorting my DNS from my IP from my PPPOA and other wonderful collections of letters.

And my computer loves it!  “Connected,” it says.

It lies.

Nothing will come up on the web browser.  Nothing doing.  The light on the modem is red. I’m no rocket scientist, but even I know that a red light on a piece of technology is never a sign that things are all fine and dandy.

So I phone Apple customer support, who have up to now proved to be consistently clear, concise and totally helpful on all related matters to my purchase.  Indeed, they are again.

We run through a number of things and they tell me that everything on the Mac is working perfectly and all the settings are as it should be.  They suggest I contact my service provider as it’s most likely that a) they haven’t activated my account or b) the network is down.

I hang up the phone despondent.  I’ve been on the internet all morning on my old computer on the same account, so I know none of those things is true.

I phone the modem manufacturer’s freephone customer service line.  It’s no longer in use – it’s now an 0845 number, which I’ll have to pay for.  Nice.

I talk to a nice man in Delhi.  He tells me everything on the router is working fine.  The red light is because my Username or password is incorrect.

I hang up the phone despondent.  I check and recheck the username and password I’ve entered.  It’s all correct.

I phone Onetel customer service.  I may or may not be talking to exactly the same bloke I just came off the phone with.  He tells me I need a load of settings to set up the modem.  I tell him I have them and I’ve done that, but he takes 15 minutes reading them to me anyway.

He starts to read me my username and password.  The username is 32 characters long and he’s spelling it out letter by letter, then using the phonetic alphabet with it.  I cut him off and reel it off to him from my notes.   As I get to the end of the line of letters and digits, everything slips into a momentary pause as a sluggish dawn swims smugly across my consciousness and I realise that the 1 I’ve entered as the 27th character is, in fact, an L.

If anyone wants me, I’ll be the one in the corner with the pointy hat on my head.

It had been my intention to sit down at some point and fill in the blanks of the past months with an epic, multi-post entry to tell my tale up to today (or up to whenever I got around to posting).

Luckily for all of you guys who are still bumbling across the site in the vain hope for a new entry, I’ve decided against it.

There are many reasons why I should and shouldn’t give up a full account of the last 4-5 weeks during which time I’ve managed to post a grand total of 0 times.

Over the months since I started this blog just before Christmas, I’ve shared a lot of the ups and downs, highs and lows, peaks and troughs of everyday life and tried to use this site as a tool to force myself to keep a bit of perspective on the whole thing – life in general and my health.  Sitting here now, after quite possibly the worst month of my life, it seems strange to say it, but I want to focus on moving forward more than raking over the past, even the not-so-distant past.

So, what you get is the shortened, edited, cut-down, weight-watchers version:

At the end of May, after my birthday, I was running pretty low, energy-wise.  In the middle of this low, I managed to pick up a cold.  Fighting the cold was one thing, but as is almost inevitable with CF, the amount of time and energy my immune system was expending  on fighting the cold virus meant I had no defences left to look after things in my lungs.

Before you could say, “seriously guys, I don’t feel very well,” I had collected myself a roaring infection and an inability to extricate myself from my bed.

After a bit of family decision making, I returned to the warm and caring centre of the family fold for my Mum to switch back to nurse/carer role in looking after me 24/7.

Even that wasn’t enough, though and within a week I was on the ward  in Oxford, having spiked an impressive temperature and gathered the mother of all infection markers.

Levels of infection in the body are most easily assessed by measuring the levels of C-reactive Protein (CRP).  Don’t ask me what it is, I just know that it should, in a normal person, be in the 0-4 range and that in PWCF it’s frequently around the 10 level, as we are often fighting low-level infection constantly.  Anything over 10 gets worrying and 20-30+ is cause for proper concern.

When I was admitted to the ward, I was told that the labs doing my bloods had stopped their CRP count when they got to 160.

Now, while I should be monumentally freaked out by all of this, I still can’t help but feel slightly short-changed as my good friend Emily once managed to mark up an impressively gob-smacking score of 400 – but they obviously like her enough to keep counting and not just give up when they get past “bloody high”.  Oh well, Em’s always done things more impressively than me, anyway.

In the midst of all this, there were lots of antibiotics being hurled around, different combos being tried here and there and various other drugs being tossed in my direction.

Most upsettingly for me at the time was being put onto a short course of steroids, which, at the dosage they were giving me, all but removed me from the active transplant list – my one chink of light in a world of enveloping blackness was being blotted out and I had no control over it.

June has been a true nightmare month, in every sense of the word.  From beginning to end I was struggling through every single day and at times it seemed like there was nowhere to go.  It is, without doubt, the closest I have come to meeting my maker and there were times over the last few weeks when I have honestly believed that someone was waiting outside the door with a conveniently held bucket for kicking.

One of the reasons I can’t take myself into much more detail than I already have is that a lot of the last few weeks is already a haze, my mind working it’s magical ways to blot out the middle-ground of strife and tedium and leaving me with but a few key moments lodged in my brain.

Thankfully, most of those key moments are the ones which give me the spur to push onwards and upwards and to keep fighting for my transplant.  There have been times in the last month when I’ve been in a darker place than I’ve ever been, but the knowledge that it’s possible to pull back from that and to recover to some semblance of normality again is reassuring beyond expression.

That’s not to say life is all sunshine and roses now – there’s a lot of things which are still a struggle and my world can still be a lonely place at times.  But I’m still here, I’m still fighting and I’m still able to laugh – at myself and others.

It’s been fitting that over the course of my last battles I’ve not managed to post anything on here, because smiling was the last thing on my mind through most of it.  Now, though, I’ve got something of my mojo back, and I’m revving up for the run-in to my new life.

Bring on the lungs, baby, I’m ready to roll.

With little fanfare, and no candles, I quietly passed into my 26th year yesterday.

Whether emailing all of your friends, posting a Myspace bulletin and blog piece count as “quiet” is perhaps a debate for another day, as I like to think it was peaceful and respectful.

My little idea of raising a hundred or so pounds for the Trust by asking for donations in place of gifts has blown me away ever so slightly. At last check, justgiving.com/oli25 was running at a massive £320, with pledges of more to come from a few corners.

It has truly over-whelmed me the number of people who have donated – especially people who I know wouldn’t have been buying me anything anyway. It means so much to me that they donated something anyway, I’ve been really touched by everyone’s response.

Thanks also to everyone who sent me birthday messages and good wishes.

I had a great day, being spoiled rotten by K all day long, with breakfast specially prepared fresh from the shop, all fresh and delicious, plus a spectacular act of rule-breaking in the most fantastic fashion including a furry orange book about the making of Avenue Q, the puppet musical I’ve become slightly obsessed with.

For the first time in a really long time, I’ve got new DVDs to add to my collection, including a few I’ve wanted to see for a really long time and a classic I really should have seen but have never got around to.

Birthdays are amazing things. They serve to remind you of all the joy you have in your life, all the people who mean something to you and to whom you mean something in return.

So many people complain so much about reaching another birthday – I guess fearful of the on-coming of old age. I don’t know where it comes from, other than an age-old, in-built fear of getting closer to losing something, whether it be your faculties or your life.

It’s always struck me, though, that people look at birthdays the wrong way. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been forced into a position where every passing year counts as a true blessing, but I don’t understand why people choose to fear their birthdays rather than embrace them.

Every year of our lives brings new adventures. It brings new experiences, new people, new wonders we know little of when we celebrate the passing of another 12 months. Every day that goes by we learn something new, we grow as a person and we extend our life beyond what it was the day before.

Surely that’s an amazing thing – so why don’t people see it and appreciate it for what it is? Is it that every year that passes we slip into more of a groove of comfort wherein everything blurs together into one homogenous experience? Do we learn over time an inability to distinguish the wood from the proverbial trees?

The saddest thing in life is when a person stops seeing the beauty that surrounds them and the experiences they are open to. Childhood is seen as the happiest time of our lives, because that’s when we take in the wonder of the world and see things for the first time – the time when we don’t think we’ve seen it all before and are eager to take it all in.

Adulthood shouldn’t be about getting bored of the same old things around us, it should be a time when we can use our years of experience and perspective to take hold of the things in life that really matter and put aside the thoughts of the things that don’t.

We should take each passing year as an opportunity to do the things we want to do, go the places we want to go, see the things we want to see, but more than anything, to not let the world blinker us to it’s beauty and ever-changing wonder simply because it’s become familiar to us.

Tomorrow morning, I want you to look out of your window when you draw back your curtains and really notice the things you can see outside it. If it’s dull and grey and there’s rain falling down, don’t let your heart sink, but turn your thoughts to the amazing way the falling water changes the way you see the street, the way the light falls differently. Take note of the things you see everyday, but look closer and find a detail you’ve not seen before.

And when you go downstairs and you greet your loved one(s), take a moment to appreciate what they bring to your life. Take a moment to think about what they’ve brought into your world that’s made you who you are. As Alfred Lord Tennyson once wrote,

“I am part of all that I have met.”