How pregnant to be born under the auspices of Janus - the god of thresholds, time, transitions, change. Being born in January, during the aftermath of the winter festivities, makes celebration seem out of place, like you have shown up just when everyone was wanting to wind down and go home. My birthdays have long not been joyous times. I am presented with a ceremonial reminder of my mortality and I undergo the concomitant melancholy that is so many of our lot with such reflections. The contrast between the happiness we are pressured to feel in holidays and celebrations and the grief that so often actually appears - that is a special guilt. While in ways this birthday was no exception, I spent my time in company better than I deserve yesterday and today, and they provide fuel for a quiet, radiant hope.

As I pass the threshold of another decade, I am thinking of people with faith - for many of whom the holding on to a belief is as much a matter of will as the maintaining of love or the pursuit of an education. Determining your will is something you need to do in the fray of contingencies and disappointments and the long, slow erosion of energies that can happen through the churn of daily life. It is tempting as ever to continue to sit alongside Ennui, to continue my long courting of his sister Despair. But thinking back on how I have done so, I see how in those indulgences, I have hurt myself and people I love in ways that have made me a twisted simulacrum of the man I wished to become.

Our cycles of aging are codas in our lives, where we can recapitulate or develop a theme - or depart to take up a new thread. I have long been surprised that I have had as many years as I have and they have been filled with such gloriously dappled things. May that I will remember both those glimmering joys in their ephemerality and the serene profundity of the greater joys that are unchanging. In them, I wish that the quiet hope I have so jealously kept tucked inside my heart will take root and bloom, so that I will be a better man for myself and for those I share this mortal coil with in the decade to come than I have been in my few that have passed.