Last night, I received a phone call from a lady friend. It was the eve of her 50th birthday, and even though she is much better adjusted than most, it was still a big deal for her.
I would make the reminder for gentlemen that there is an inherent and powerfully structural biological difference for ladies of this age, as they experience an inline incarnational death around this age – the childbearing person they were since their early teens comes to an end, and a structurally DIFFERENT person comes into being.
So this is NOT about vanity or prettiness; it is a lot more than that on every level and it was little wonder that my friend felt unsure. What she did NOT want to happen is to go into this first night of the 50th year of her life full of regrets, worries, sorrows and loss of life; she wanted something better than that for herself, a celebration to help with this threshold moment, delineated by the way we measure time and count the days.
We could have easily chatted away the last remaining hour and a half before the clock struck 12 midnight and try and ignore this thing; but I didn’t feel that this was appropriate as it is a highly...