I don’t know about you, but for a long time I’ve been hating to celebrate my birthday. Guess that was the result of how birthdays were celebrated during my childhood. As a little child I probably liked all the presents people brought with them and to play around with the kids. But growing older, birthdays became more and more boring. People you wouldn’t normally spent an afternoon with sitting on a couch talking about nothing. I just hated it. The days became longer and longer and I had no idea how to get out. It just weren’t my kind of people!

So as soon as I had the opportunity to decide for myself, I just avoided being at home during my birthday, so I wouldn’t feel obligated to invite those people I didn’t want to talk to in the first place… Funny ha? So I made sure I was busy somewhere…

Few years later I was finally brave enough to create my own celebration the way I wanted it with the people I wanted to be with. I would go to a spa with some friends or go to a theatre or something nice.

This year I didn’t have to think about who to invite or what to do. I would be in the middle of a great training that I had brought over from the USA to the Netherlands and I would be surrounded by a lot of people I love and they ALL would be interested in personal growth and development and so it wouldn’t be boring!

And it was just great. Having a group of wonderful people singing a birthday song, getting beautiful red roses. I felt blessed. Blessed to be in this place, with all these beautiful souls…

To give something back to this group I read an amazing text of Paul van Vliet, a dutch artist. You can read the dutch text on his site: www.paulvanvliet.nl . It’s all about faith, trust, falling down and getting up again. About having the courage to step forward in life. To not look back or get stuck in the past. It’s about taking that leap of faith and live life to the fullest.

And that is what I am going to do in my new year: live life to the max!