As I write this, I’m snacking on leftover ice cream, several days past another birthday.

Normally, I try to avoid making my birthday anything special, mostly due to the way birthdays were treated throughout most of my childhood. Add these childhood experiences under the sliced bananas of a stark reminder of the reality of getting older, and I would just as soon sit home alone, quietly, than make my birthday a huge production.

This year’s birthday was a bit noisier than I would have normally cared for, having accepted an invitation to dinner with my in-laws who were in town, and then making the mistake of selecting one of the few places here that carried the Packers-Cowboys NFL game.

As I poked at my salmon dish while sipping on a rum and coke, I realized that even in a restaurant full of people, at a table full of family, with birthday messages I am humbled by and grateful for on my Blackberry from literally all over the world, it’s still possible to feel as if you’re alone on an island, waiting to be rescued.

The saying goes “nobody can know you as well as you know yourself”, and, for the most part, that is true. The problem is getting to know yourself, and then coming to terms and accepting what comes from that. That is something that, despite all my years on this planet, I haven’t quite grasped yet.

Until then, I’ll continue to sit at that table, alone with my thoughts, waiting for the screaming silence that is inner peace.

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