The Thing About Getting Older

 Last year, on my birthday, I did a very blogger-like thing and wrote about twenty things I had learned in the past twenty years. When I published that post, I assumed that writing what I had learned in the past years would become an annual birthday tradition. This year, my birthday rolled around sooner than I expected though. And I could have posted twenty-one clichéd things I had learned in the past year, but something about that seemed really fake this year. It is not that last year's post was fake. It is just that I am in no way a lifestyle blogger, and that kind of post did not seem like something I would do anymore. I am a nerd who likes to share her opinions about everything under the sun with the internet.
  I did learn a lot last year. As I oh-so-eloquently stated in one post, I learned that to be hopeful you must be intentional. I also re-learned that nothing lasts forever. I mean, God is eternal, and so is the human soul, but there were things in my life that I took for granted would always be there. Friends, marriages, life itself. I did know that all of those things had the potential to go away, but I never expected them to. It is not that bad things have never happened before, it is just that more of them seem to have come from my fellow human beings this past year.
  Change is inevitable. Its leaves behind memories both good and bad. Last year I learned to remember to hope. I also learned to let the good past go because though it may be good, it is the past. God has me living today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. As I live between yesterday and tomorrow, I am learning to trust that no matter what the past had, and no matter what the future holds, God will help me in the step I take in this moment. And learning that is so much more worthwhile than learning coffee is the elixir of life.