The sun has set. It’s gone down on a decade. The sun has gone down on my forties.
The sunset in the photo above is the one I witnessed as my family and I returned from an almost three hour long whale watching cruise. We travelled from a riverside jetty near the mouth of the Murchison River in Kalbarri, past some small waves and out into the open seas to see some humpback whales swimming off the coast.
As we made our way back to the jetty I looked behind us towards the sea. The sun was getting lower in the sky. It dropped slowly at first and then it seemed to pick up speed as it dipped into the ocean, lighting up the sky.
I realised that this would be the final time I would see a sunset while still in my forties. Tomorrow I’ll be fifty.
Tomorrow the sun will rise, just as on any other day. The world won’t change. I won’t feel dramatically different yet there is still something in those significant birthdays that cause us to look back and look ahead.
When did you last celebrate a ‘significant’ birthday? Did it feel the same as any other day or did it feel somehow different? What did you do to mark the occasion?
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What is it about certain time periods that add extra significance to remembering our life history? Why do we celebrate milestones differently to anniversaries of events in other years?