July 23, 2024

Today, somehow, I turn 60 years old.

I arrived in this world on the full moon of July, 1964. It was a blazing hot New Jersey day, and even though my due date was a couple of days later, my mother didn’t like her doctor and he was returning from vacation the next day, so she walked for miles from our home at Princeton University’s graduate student housing to the not-so-nearby hospital, hoping the exercise would encourage me to make my move early and spare her having to deal with the doctor she wished to avoid. Apparently I was agreeable, so later that night, under the rays of the waxing peak full moon, I landed in this world and started breathing my first. I am a Leo child, born in the year of the Dragon, born on the full moon of Guru Purnima. That’s how it all started.

My mother used to tell me:  “From the day you were born, Adam, you were like a ray of pure sunshine. You would always light up whatever room we walked into.” What a beautiful remembrance that was.

Many years later, when my mama was preparing to die, and we were having all the conversations you would want to have knowing that there weren’t many left, I thanked her and acknowledged all of the sacrifices I knew she had made in order to raise me and my siblings. I am childless, but enough of my family and friends have had children over the years that I’ve seen close-up how many personal priorities they put on the back shelf in order to best care for their children. I wanted to make sure my mother knew how grateful I was, and how much I recognized that dynamic, and her sacrifices. Her reply? “It never felt like a sacrifice.”

Big round numbers are mostly illusionary and fundamentally without meaning–but they do stick in the craw and get one thinking, sometimes. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the arc of my life, the big themes and trajectories that I’ve been navigating over decades now. What I seem to have come here to work on and develop in myself. At some point I may share more on those themes. But for now, let me just say this: I’m so glad to be alive, for all the blessings in my life, for my opportunities to be a blessing in the lives of others, and for all that is still yet to come. Onward!