On the 49th Anniversary of my Birth

Today is my 49th birthday, and today I start living my 50th year on this planet. I'm fortunate to be healthy and relatively happy with numerous people to be thankful for in my life, which poses a philosophical problem as I do not thank any deity for my life or the people in it since I do not believe in one. I am grateful for many things, but I am still bitter about quite a bit too, so with the sappy sentimentality come the caveats that things could and sometimes should be better. I am not one for positive affirmations or Norman Vincent Peale quotes; I am more contemplative in my search for truth, preferring Keats or Byron or Dickinson to contemporary self-help writers and gurus. I suppose I have created my life, although I really think that life just happens and takes a person along its path and we really cannot choose, as I think Frost knew deep in his heart after so much heartache. His regret of the path he took is so misunderstood; the path not taken, the one that everyone else took, would have made an easier life for him, but he chose the other one because of his temperament and his abilities. These things determine where we are drawn and sometimes quartered (Apologies for the pun).