Level 53 Birthday Message & Gift
Celebrating 53 in Good Health & Gratitude.
As a little token of immense appreciation to those, who have taken time out of their busy lives, to send me beautiful birth & life messages and keep me in their thoughts and prayers, I wrote the following note.
On the 19th of July, 2026 I have leveled up. I have long stopped calling them birthdays. I call them levels — because a birthday is something that happens to you, while a level is something you earn, achieve or work towards to. And I arrive at Level 53 in good health: physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Eight wheels under one skater. All of them are still rolling.
This did not happen by accident. The body you inhabit at 53 is the invoice for every training session you honored — and every one you skipped. The mood you wake up with is not weather; it is architecture. You built it, rep by rep, choice by choice. If it's not trained, it is not maintained.
I say this now because life, with its inevitable sense of dramatic timing, has chosen this season to present me with one of the toughest, most emotionally charged challenges a human being can face. I am a primary caregiver. Anyone who has carried that title knows it is not a role — it is a rough ride. The only certainty you have is that it's going to get worse; until it's over. And every day you must decide how to navigate a worsening situation.
And here is what four decades on wheels and five decades on this earth have taught me: the most important skill at this level is not strength which I have in abundance; not endurance which I have built to last and not even balance which I still experience as impeccable in the most challenging circumstances. It is the ability to stay in a good mood when there are more than enough reasons not to.
That skill has self-imposed rules. When something troubles me, I try not to take it out on other people — pain passed sideways is pain multiplied. I have never experienced morning grumpiness in my entire existence; the day has not yet earned my resentment, so why hand it over on credit? And when knowledge arrives, I convert it into action — because action is the antidote to the most seductive addiction of all: the habitual complaint about circumstances beyond our control. Complaining is a rehearsal for helplessness, which eventually leads to weakening of your entire system. I refuse the rehearsal.
Alan Watts might say the storm and the calm are the same water, differently arranged. Neurologist Oliver Sacks might have noted that the patients who astonished him most were never the ones spared suffering, but the ones who found music inside it. I simply say: I am still rolling through life, from decade to decade.
So on the verge of Level 53, this is my message — my gift, if you'll take it.
Do not wait for the circumstances to improve before you allow yourself joy. Joy postponed is joy taxed. Enjoy life now — this imperfect, heavy, luminous now — because there is a future version of you, standing somewhere down the road, looking back at this exact moment, urging you to enjoy where you are right now.
Prepare your future self right now.
May Your Journey Be A Soulful One.
— Brian aka Bfunkphenomenon
p.s. In 2023, at level 50 I did the math in a short essay for what I refer to as the Final Countdown. Click on the e-book image below for more info.
