Today is my birthday. Yes, it really is. On September 13th a couple of decades ago (okay, okay, maybe it was more than a couple of decades ago), I took my first breath at Korle-Bu Hospital in Accra. There is something magical about birthdays, more so than any other holiday, including Christmas (which, by the way, was not Jesus’s actual birthday). Maybe that’s because from the moment we come into being, our birthdays mark our passage through time, the various stages and developments in our life as we inch our way toward the inevitable, that moment when we will cease to exist. Birthdays are especially magical for children. It is the one day every year when they own the universe, when the world revolves around only them. And they exercise that entitlement with tremendous glee—carefully deciding how they will celebrate, and which of their friends are worthy enough to be invited to join in the festivities, carefully contemplating the gifts they’d like to receive. What I remember most about the birthdays of my childhood is staying awake on the eve of the big day and waiting for the clock to strike midnight. I believed somehow that I would feel myself getting older, making the shift from a seven-year-old to an eight-year-old, from a twelve-year-old to a thirteen-year-old. Of course, that’s not what happened; all the wisdom and growth that accompany age did not come barrelling into my brains and body in one fell swoop. Year after year I would wake up disappointed because I did not feel any different. “Oh, you will,” the adults in my life would tell me. “Just give it time.” And that I could because when you’re young you’re under the delusion that you’ve got all the time in the world. Somebody once sent my mother a birthday card that declared in letters formed with rainbow-coloured glitter: “Life begins at 40!” I nearly choked on my laughter. 40? What kind of life could a person possibly begin at 40? In my mind 40 was ancient; 40 was one foot in the coffin and the other on a banana peel. 40 seemed like aeons away. Yet as the sun returns day after day, the years came one after the other, and sooner than I could have ever imagined, I turned 40. By then, I understood all too well the meaning of those shimmering words. By then, I had already started asking myself the big questions: what is the purpose of my life? What am I doing to make this world in which I live a better place? What legacy am I leaving? It was 2001, in the days preceding my birthday that I started to ask myself those questions. It was a Tuesday morning in Los Angeles, where I lived. I was driving my daughter to school. We had barely started our commute, barely pulled out of our driveway when I turned on the radio and heard the announcement: two airplanes had been hijacked and flown into the Twin Towers at the World Trade Centre complex in New York. Thousands of people lost their lives; and for thousands more, life as they knew it was forever changed. That event had a profound impact on me, not least of all because it happened two days before my birthday. It wasn’t a “milestone” birthday, but it was another birthday. Whereas in my youth, the wait between birthdays seemed interminable, now it seemed to pass in a flash. The birthdays seemed to be arriving with a rapidity that was alarming. Now, the reason for my growing disappointment wasn’t that I could not feel the changes that were happening to me; it was that I could. Not only could I feel the changes, I could see them. My gray hairs were multiplying. My once-athletic body was becoming doughy and yielding to gravity. The life that I was living bore no resemblance to the life that I had envisioned, even daydreamed about, when I was younger. And time. Time, time, time; there never seemed to be enough of it. So there I was with my birthday fast approaching, going about my daily routine, lamenting the loss of another year. And there they were, those thousands of people, going about their daily routines, unaware that they would not live to see another day, let alone another birthday. Right away I knew there was a lesson in that parallel. It was then that I decided I wanted to do more than mark my passage through time. I want to consciously mark my presence in this world, in this life, in whatever positive way I can, be it through a simple kindness or a significant achievement. Nowadays what I celebrate on my birthday is my growth as a human being; it’s the lessons I’ve learned through pain, through love, compassion, forgiveness and fear. It’s the ability to even wake up and say, or write, “today’s my birthday”; the gift of having one more day to do better, to be better. We so often get mired in the minutia of our lives that we forget to be grateful for the very life we’re living. This might sound trite, but it’s true. And I know, it’s much easier said than done, but it’s well worth the effort of trying. It’s well worth the effort of knowing, as the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson said, that “what lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” Meri Nana-Ama Danquah is currently at work on a memoir, Eating Seafood in Ethiopia: And Other Terrible Mistakes I’ve Made While Travelling. This article was originally published in the Daily Graphic newspaper on September 13, 2013 and is being used with the permission of the author, who can be reached at view@danquah.com.