A birthday...

...and a death.

This wasn't quite what I was thinking about posting here today, but my plans were altered by the news this morning of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. She was fifty-four years old. Today, I enter another decade of life as I find that I've somehow managed to survive sixty turns around the sun. It's my sixtieth birthday.

Like so many of my friends, I don't feel like I'm sixty years old.

Some days, when I'm tired and cranky, I feel like a five-year-old. Some days, when the symptoms of MS are on a rampage, I feel like a ninety-five year old. But most days, I feel like I'm somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five - old enough to have stored up some wisdom, but young enough to laugh like a maniac when I watch an episode of "Family Guy" on TV.

So maybe the reality is that no one really feels their true age? Or that age, as so many people insist, is irrelevant?

When I look in the mirror and see that the gray hair is starting to win the battle with the dark brown hair, or that those once-imperceptible lines under my eyes are suddenly a lot more apparent, it becomes quite clear that I've lived each and every one of those sixty years. But inside, where it counts the most, there's still a young woman with a silly sense of humor and a desire to keep on living life as fully as possible - in spite of the passage of years and the damage to her fragile central nervous system.

As the sad news this morning reminded me, yet again, life is both fragile and miraculous, and never something to be taken for granted.

So on this day of my birth back in 1947, I remind everyone who bothers to read this little blog to take a moment to breathe deeply and be grateful for your life. I'm sure grateful for mine.