What's the best way to spend time on your birthday?

Today is my 37th birthday. This was by far the most fascinating and challenging year of my life. As I was falling sleep last night, I started to think about what I would do with an entirely empty day for my birthday (side note: Saturday birthdays are the best birthdays!)

The answer became clear almost immediately:

Design your birthday to be exactly how you would approach every day if there was nothing else in the way.

It got me thinking about the design of my perfect day.

Be intentional about the design of your time. When you design your perfect day, it becomes a moving towards goal. It's not something you flip a switch and magically start living that way every day. You integrate what you can, try it out, see what you like and then either add more or remove what you don't like. It's a giant experiment in what it's like to be you.

My perfect day starts with yoga and mediation to gently welcome my mind and body to this new day. Then some reading and writing. Conversations with people I love, sprinkled with delicious and healthy food, all while working on things that are important to me. Add in some time for reflection and some time for play, and it's a wrap. (Connection to nature would be in there as well, but my current options in NYC are limited so we're skipping that today.)

Figure out the design for a perfect day that would be desirable to live over and over again, and that's exactly how you should spend your birthday.