Today is Your Birthday!

Today is your birthday! A day for just you. Return to bed, binge on Netflix, or scroll through your phone for an hour or two!

Today is your birthday. “Me, myself, and I!” Shout it from the rooftops, really, don’t be shy!

Today is your birthday. You can eat whatever you want! Bake up some donuts and post pics on Instagram. It’s all about the flaunt.

Today is your birthday. The mantra: “It’s all about me!” Thank goodness for Amazon Prime, the mall, and Anthropologie!

Today is your birthday. Friends better to post on your wall. Better yet, why not share a selfie; humblebrag to remind them all?

Today is your birthday. Gonna treat yo’self all day. So many presents, too many even for Santa’s sleigh!

Today is your birthday. Start celebrating at once! But wait, why do you just get one day? Can’t it be your week, or your month?

Yes, our culture dictates that it’s our birthday all the time. And really, constant birthdays aren’t supreme or sublime.

Having cake every day makes it less special, making cake meaningless, as they say.

Our “Self-Care” / “Treat Yo’Self” generation reinforces privilege and demoralization, throwing self-control out the door.

“Self-Care” should be a time for moderation, contemplation, and gratitude. That’s what it’s for!

So if every day is “Birthday!”, we should take more time to care. For ourselves and our loved ones. Be moderate and self-aware.

And if today is really your birthday, you can of course have cake, and be sure to share!

But if every day is a birthday, why not turn inward, and take a look at what’s really there?

Make Gratitude a Practice Instead of a Hashtag

#begrateful #sothankful #gratitude

These concepts are always trending. We always seem to advertise our gratitude for friends, family, colleagues, resources, and our health. And, we desperately want our gratitude to be validated by having others “like” our posts about what we are grateful for. However, gratefulness and gratitude aren’t things that can be accomplished by hash-tagging on social media.

Gratitude is not a trend, which by definition, implies it will only be around for a short time.

Gratitude is a practice. This means we must donate time and effort to gratitude, and employ self-discipline to create a habit out of showing others we are thankful.

When we make gratitude into a personal tradition, our perceptions shift naturally to allow more gratitude into our lives. We are more able to acknowledge that when people are nice to us, they are doing it on purpose, so that we can benefit from their “time, treasure, or talent." Recognizing when others are grateful helps us to feel good; moreover, it inspires us to do good things for others.

Gratitude helps us “see ourselves as part of a larger, intricate network of sustaining relationships that are mutually reciprocal." It is in this cyclical rhythm of thankfulness that we are able to really to feed the trend toward gratitude, so that this virtue continues to nourish our lives.

When we make gratitude a practice instead of a hashtag, we will able to flourish and thrive.

Web of Belongingness

There was once an animal behaviorist who devised a theory about human needs. Through the study of monkeys, Abraham Maslow concluded that, in order to reach our full potentials, we have to belong. This basic need, above needs such as food, water, shelter, and safety, takes root in our need to feel important, and to see our importance reflected in the mind's of others. We have an innate desire to be socially acknowledged, and we maintain our social selves by chronicling our accomplishments on resumes and portfolios, and on social and professional networks.

We belong to families, to high school friend circles, to college societies, and to employment related groups. We assert our social selves in digital arenas, email chains, and text messages. We say "yes" to each wedding invitation, each Sunday brunch, each "friend" request, and follower. Our web of belongingness reaches further and further with each successive interaction, and our social needs, stretched thin, become more transparent and more difficult to define and satisfy. We are left questioning ourselves - How do we know when we are done belonging? When can we simply belong?

Satisfying social needs has become more complex since the 1940s when Maslow published his first book on human motivation. Currently, and very obviously, we not only have to satisfy these needs in our real world, but we must also satisfy them in a virtual world as well. The decisions we make regarding the need to belong have become limitless with all the available methods of communication. Often we worry that we may miss out on a social event of some kind, or a friend connection on Facebook, and we continually expand our reach. With every "yes" or click, there resides a hope that, finally, our belonging needs will be fulfilled.

Unfortunately, endless physical and virtual opportunities to connect muddle the definition of social "needs," and transform these needs into social "wants." Our progress is limited not only by the confusion between what we need socially, and what we want socially, but also by the simple fact that we often don't take the time to be grateful for the belongingness we already feel. Showing gratitude can help us to appreciate what we have, and help us to avoid superficial social actions and connections that accumulate into "wants." Maslow argued that if we demonstrate small acts of gratitude, and are thankful for what relationships we have, we will know more about what we truly need socially. We will thrive in our ability to "enjoy life in general and practically all its aspects, while most other people enjoy only stray moments of triumph."