It's NOT my 60th birthday . . . I'm just 39, for the 21st time

Sixty years old. 

Sounds old. So, I'll express it this way: I'm marking my 39th birthday . . . for the 21st time.

Honestly, a few years ago I did not expect to make it this far. Except for, IMHO, miraculous intervention and skilled docs (they do work together, you know), I would not have done. Since age 55, really, I've felt I was on borrowed time, and I became convinced of it a little more than a year ago when an aortic valve replacement helped me avoid what the cardiologist said was imminent death.

It's been a strange journey. My profession has made me an observer. My faith has made me an uncomfortable participant, as belief has wrestled with that human feeling (certainty?) of cosmic incompetence.

You do your best. You depend on faith to bridge the gap between comfort and conviction, insecurity and aspiration, fear and courage, mediocrity and the dream.

You don't want to leave anything important undone.

I think of Hemingway's character, "Harry," in the short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," who awaits death from a gangrenous leg wound on a cot in an African hunting camp. He laments having waited to write things, thinking he had to wait for accumulated experience before he could do those things justice. Now, those things would go unwritten.

Now, that he had weighed his life, seen what was truly real, judged himself, punished himself. He faces the end, dissatisfied with his spiritual sloth, and yet, as he drifts toward the end, acceptance and peace and perhaps self-forgiveness come.

That was Hemingway's hope, for Harry and himself. The horror, the truth is that the realization of dreams unsought due to personal cowardice, insecurity and procrastination are too often the last thoughts before the end.

There's a hyena that skulks around the camp at night, coming closer each night. Like Harry's leg, is smells. In the story, the foul odor and death personified become one.

One passage I like a lot from the final moments of Harry's life is part of a prolonged conversation with his wife. I find it particularly poignant:

"Do you feel anything strange?" he asked her.

"No. Just a little sleepy."

"I do," he said.

He had just felt death come by again.

"You know the only thing I've never lost is curiosity," he said to her.

I wake up, every day, curious. Curious about what life will bring to me and my loved ones that day. Curious about how news events I will witness, report on and read about and see that day will affect the Story of Humanity.

That's the baseline, the purely human part of me, I suspect. Add to that a sense of awe, adoration of God and his creations, the rare wonder of life in all its varieties, and regardless of the really minor irritations that we perceive as mountains, it's worth getting up and walking into the dawn.