Two of my favorite gifts ever are a pair of boots and an iphone. The Frye boots were purchased with my mother, who managed to talk the Nordstrom salesguy into finding my size at the clearance price and shipping them to my house, in real New York style. That alone makes the gift an experience, but these boots have since become part of me. I love them enough to wear them on airplanes despite the security lines, to buy outfits to match them, and to plan whole trips around what I will bring to justify my boots. They are just enough of everything–enough style for my fashionista self, enough cowgirl for my outdoorsy self, enough heel for my short-girl self. Love them.

The iphone is a gift from my dad–no matter that it’s a castoff, for he’s even more of a technology junkie than I am. I cannot wait to activate this phone–I love it because it’s life, folded into a sleek little package–pictures, and music, meeting over coffee, emails and twitter and little chats on text, o my. I can’t wait.

But today is my birthday and now I’m thirty-three. Birthdays make me want to think, about my life so far and the life still to come–and I’ve found a gift even better than boots or a phone.

Here’s the gift I’m giving myself this year:

• Accepting that my thirties are a funny time, past the time when you are considered “young” but not old enough to be considered “wise.”
• Knowing how much I don’t know.
• Becoming more sure about some things–about what I love, what’s worth spending time on–and less sure about many other things.
• Knowing with certainty that I’m completely uncertain about my future–and that’s OK.
• Resolving that I can’t be in more than one place at one time, and deciding to live well in that place and that time. When I’m in the longest line at Wal-Mart behind the grandmother buying four year’s worth of school supplies and paying with a check, I can live well, even in that spot. Yes I can.
• I choose to accept my mortality. How much I can do well. How long I can push without rest. And how desperately I need God’s presence, that whisper of certainty even in the clouds, the affirmation of love even in doubt, the presence of peace even in tension.

That is my gift to myself, and this is my goal for this year:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because  you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day to the answer. (“Letters to a Young Poet”, Rilke, as quoted in ”The Courage to Teach”, Palmer)

I resolve to speak with conviction about what I know, and more importantly, about what I still do not know.

I wonder about you: What is the gift you want, or more importantly, need, to give yourself this year?