🎂 Happy Half-Century Birthday To Me!

What I've learnt about toast & being happy

Today I am fifty. Fifty years on this amazing planet! What have I learnt about life in half a decade? Let me begin with a story about toasters.

Allow me a rare sorry-not-good-for-artists-or-the-planet AI image on my birthday? I asked for “50th birthday party, byzantine Japanese woodblock scene, cat”

Last night I got trapped on my phone, looking for the perfect toaster¹.

All being well, we will be moving out of our flat in the Buddhist temple and into a little house of our own in a few week’s time. Our current toaster is broken in various ways - knobs have fallen off and every time we push the toast down we hurt our fingers a little bit. What better time to buy a fresh shiny one for the new house?

But, which toaster? Scroll, scroll, scroll.

I am drawn to the SMEG toaster, which is beautiful, blazingly middle-class, and £137. Am I the sort of person who spends that much on a toaster? Even after we find some not-so-good reviews?

I also like the funky retro toasters in their shiny pastels. Am I cool enough for them? Would they go with the rest of our new ordinary kitchen?

Maybe we should be practical. What toaster has the best reviews? Could I live with the boring look of it?

I try on various toaster-identities like clothes, agonising. It must be perfect! It must represent me! This is the start of the rest of my life! But how to keep all the different parts of me happy?

In the end, late at night, I became tired of myself. With Kaspa’s agreement I plump for a shiny silver toaster with a sexy line of blue light at its base. In bed I lie awake with buyer’s remorse. I secretly wanted the SMEG toaster. Maybe I could send this one back?

This morning I ate strawberry jam on toast for breakfast.

The bread was good sourdough, baked in a bakery just over the road from the temple and sliced in their clever slicing machine. The jam was a discovery - rich and full of fruity complexity, it tastes like someone’s grandma made it, but it’s from our cheap local supermarket. I do love a bargain.

Yummy bite. Yummy bite. Yummy bite. It was DELICIOUS.

As I ate my jam and toast I gazed across the valley. This morning, early October, it was shrouded in layers of mist - pooling in the hollows between the hills. The rows of trees paled as they stretched into the distance, reminding me of those cut-outs used in children’s cardboard stages. The sun began to melt the mist away.

My eyes travelled here, rested there. It was BEAUTIFUL.

As I ate, it occurred to me that I was eating perfect toast from our ‘faulty’ toaster - the one that could do with a bit of a clean and that certainly no longer represents me as a person. I was sitting in our flat, not in our new house where I thought I wanted to be, and the view was breath-taking. I was happy.

Okay, just one more! “chocolate, byzantine Japanese woodblock scene”

What are my plans for my special birthday?

Before we decided to move house, I had planned a major sabbatical. I was going to take six weeks off work, go on retreat, go travelling, maybe throw in a trip on a hot air balloon and a few trips to London.

As we approached the day, and with all the tricky things that I’ve had on my plate recently, I asked myself again. What’s going to make you happy?

On Sunday I am having lunch with five friends at the lovely vegan café less than five minutes walk from the temple. On my birthday I am going to breakfast on chocolate croissant and then buy some magazines and spend the day reading, lazing, watching RuPaul and walking the dogs. I have a very exciting evening planned: watching a film and cuddling on the sofa under blankets with Kaspa and the dogs.

Simple pleasures. Good toast.

Oh, and there will DEFINITLY be chocolate.

What have I learnt in fifty years? Well, squillions of things - that’s why I write to you every week 😉 I hope that, in whatever time I have left, I continue to learn a squillion more.

But one of the best is: I don’t need a fancy toaster.

Even better, I don’t need to BE a fancy toaster/a fancy Satya. I can be an ordinary Satya, with some broken knobs that sometimes hurt your fingers a little bit. I still make pretty damn good toast.

Go gently,
Satya <3

PS Wishing you the equivalent of some good jam-on-toast and a beautiful view today.

PPS If you’d like to offer me a little birthday gift, I’d love to hear about a Small Good Thing you’ve enjoyed recently - do share in the comments. If it’s toast too then we can be toast-siblings.

1. If you’re reading from the US I’m not entirely sure you’ll know what I mean by a toaster - a pop-up toaster? Do you have them? Anyway - the thing you put bread in to make toast!