Quote of the Day: John Glenn on Daily Inspiration

The feed never stops: wellness hacks, productivity sprints, and highlight reels that quietly suggest you’re behind schedule. In that kind of noise, even a birthday can feel less like a celebration and more like a scoreboard. Then a calmer truth cuts through the static: “There is still no cure for the common birthday.”

The genius is in the word “common.” By borrowing the language of the common cold, the quote lowers the temperature on our fear of aging. Birthdays are not an emergency; they’re baseline humanity, democratic, unavoidable, and indifferent to titles, bank balances, or ambition. You don’t need to “fix” the fact that time passes. You need to decide how to meet it.

That shift, from eradication to engagement, gives you back agency. If you can’t cancel the calendar, you can build a better ritual around it: review what you learned, name what you’re grateful for, and choose one direction you want the next year to lean. Each birthday holds a paradox worth using: less remaining time, more accumulated experience. Treat it as both memento mori and memento vitae, an honest reminder that finitude is what sharpens meaning, and a prompt to practice humility without losing courage.

It lands differently coming from John Glenn, who became a pioneering astronaut in the Mercury program and later served the public for decades as a U.S. senator, then returned to space at seventy-seven, proving that aging is terrain to explore, not a diagnosis to dread.

Today, take ten minutes and write a “birthday note” to your future self: one habit to keep, one distraction to drop, and one relationship to strengthen, then act on the smallest piece immediately. May you greet time as a companion, and let each ordinary year feel like a quiet miracle.