My birthday wish

Every year I would wish for something different for my birthday. It started off with new toys, which then turned into wishes for new clothes or a trip to Disneyland. I wished for a boyfriend (or at least to find someone I’d really like) for a few years, and then switched to wishing things would stay the same after I found someone I loved.

This year for my 25th birthday, I wished for something I had never wished before and I think it’s going to remain as my wish every year from now on: I wish for everyone I care about to stay healthy.

Health is the most important. It never felt like it before because everyone around me was always well and alive and so I took it for granted, but good physical and mental health is now my number one priority and blessing.

It’s not that other things are not important. I still want to be in a happy relationship. I still want to have the same friends. I still want to reach my career goals. I still want the Adidas NMD and a tripod and a new laptop and to go backpacking once a year, but guess what? None of those things are important or applicable if I’m not healthy.

One of the things that kills me the most about being ill is that you don’t get to receive the opportunity for things to get better. Yes, you can be healthy and still be unhappy and have life’s shit thrown at you, but having good health and a combination of other things (like a positive attitude, persistence, hard work, support networks, etc.) means there’s always a chance for things to get better, for you to be better.

Wishing for health seems like such an old person thing to do. It’s what my grandma wishes for me every time we end our phone conversation. Until this year, I really felt like I was invincible and that I would stay healthy forever – that my knees wouldn’t hurt from 7 hour hikes or that I can still get wasted and suffer no hangovers the next morning.

This year I’ve learned that I don’t take good enough care of myself and neither do many of the people around me. We’re busy chasing our dreams, earning money, figuring out who we are, finding someone we want to be with, achieving milestones we thought we would’ve reached by now. We don’t let our bodies rest, we don’t let our minds relax, we don’t let our hearts heal.

Good health is the foundation of everything we want in life because it gives us time. It gives us time to reach our dreams, to make those six figures, to discover all the greatness and darkness inside ourselves, to learn how to love someone.

I wish for all of us to have enough time to be everything we hope to be.

When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot manifest, strength cannot fight, wealth becomes useless, and intelligence cannot be applied.
― Herophilus

Sincerely, Loewe