Happy 38th BIRTHDAY to ME

CAUTIOUS: The journal you are reading containing 'SYIOK SENDIRI' elements. DO NOT PROCEED IF YOU FIND IT OFFENSIVE. HaHa.

This journal also served as a reminder to you that I came to this world today 38 years ago. I'm turning 38 TODAY. Just saying that sentence out loud feels unreal, like I'm talking about someone else. 38, WHO? ME! Unbelievable! I don't feel it at all.
I remember my sister, Jessica once had said this on one fine day.
'When I look in the mirror, I always think, What's happened to me? I just can't understand why I have all these wrinkles, all this gray hair? She was grinning, as was her way. 'Because I feel exactly the same as I did when I was 18.' She was probably 35 then.
I spent my 20's finding the bliss at cocktail parties and clubs, while bouncing from job to job, vaguely zigzagging up a ladder of sorts, only to make a difficult though rewarding shift in my middle 30s to a job often undertaken by people much younger.
GONE are the days of living to please other peoples and making judgments about what others should be doing to please me. Well, I can't seem to shake this nagging feeling that I've wasted too much time getting here and that I'll soon be too OLD to get anywhere else. TIRING, huh?
There is nothing wrong inherently with 38, but I haven't taken to it very well. It is one of those transitional ages with little identity of its own: a pit stop you make as you barrel along the interstate toward 40. For most of us, at least, it's too late for college or building a business empire. Anyhow, 38, hopefully this number which phonologically mean a blessing of 'growth and prosperity' in Cantonese, may bring a wide grin to ME.
As one friend put it, 40 is when you realize that your life is your life and that you probably won't be making anything radically different out of it. The anxiety that creates is new to me. For the first time, I recognize that the possibilities for reinvention are narrowing. Though my sister once said, I feel like a teenager, full of ambition and dreams about the future, but lately that has tempered by the creeping suspicion that these could only be fantasies I will never make real.
I begin to tell myself just to get over it. I am LUCKY to be healthy and loved and to have figured out the little I have. And besides, after decades of self-struggle, yearning, learning of living with a stroke episode; had given me a certain wisdom. I finally felt that maybe, I had something valuable to say.

NOW is the BEST time in our life. The years before were definitely harder.

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CHEER UP and enjoy today because it will get worse.
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Everyday?is a NEW day.
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WRINGKLES is a collective noun for beauty of cumulative wisdom.
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It is too soon to get OLD, too OLD to get WISE.
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P/S: Life used to be a rat race. Everything was about being better than everyone else, and I was never contented with what I had. Then came lately, a friend of mine, who are just a tiny bit older report an enviable sense of self-knowledge, confidence, calm and inner peace. I can only hope to get there, TOO. PLEASE HELP IF YOU KNOW THE WAY.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SEAN

The Ring Searching Route