Only famous people write memoirs, right? That’s usually the thinking.

I’m not famous. But in my mind, I have a memoir written. It is a memoir of the fifty years that brought me to this day. Fifty years of memories etched into my mind and my body.

My fifty years on this plane of existence began exactly fifty years ago at St. Joseph Hospital in Baltimore at 3:45 a.m. on a Sunday.

I was brought home to a two-story house in the suburbs of Maryland. I still see it in my mind’s eye — the yellow aluminum siding and brown metal railings that encircled the front stoop, the barn-style roof, the birch and the cherry tree in the front yard, the maple tree in the back that always had a collection of ladybugs on it. That was the place I called home for forty years of my life, long after I had left and moved out west. It was my starting point.

I have within me fifty years of history. I can hardly fathom the millions of tiny moments that made up those fifty years. Just as Einstein taught that light is made up of particles and waves, so too, I think, is life. How many bowls of cereal did I eat for breakfast over the course of fifty years? How many morning runs did I go on? How many sunrises did I watch? How many did I miss? What does it all say about how I like to live my days?

I look back over fifty years of people floating in and out of my life. Sometimes they linger for years. Sometimes for just a fleeting moment. Regardless of the time they were with me, they shaped me. Every curve of who I am can be traced back to a word or a moment in the presence of another. I remember the sister and brother I stayed with in Boulder, Colorado as I searched for an apartment of my own. There was the French pastry baker I made small talk with at the weekly farmers market. There’s my friend Subita in a remote part of India who cared for me like a big sister even though we could barely communicate in the same language. There was Mary, full of passion and energy, whose family I spent a Thanksgiving with, who died so many years ago now from cancer.

I carry fifty years of feelings and sensory experiences within my muscles, skin, and nerve tissues. They are an undercurrent to my daily life. It’s almost spiritual. Sometimes I see the way the sun hits the side of a building, or smell the weather, or hear a familiar song and a surge of memory-laden feeling rises to the surface of my being. I have to stop what I’m doing and acknowledge it, even if I have no idea what I’m being reminded of in the moment. Memories and feelings are like that. They rise and fall in a flash. They tease with their charades.

It would take a lifetime to jot down even the more substantive memories that make up my fifty years. They are the bright stars in the constellation inside of me. The birthdays. My wedding. The time I ran the New York Marathon. My father’s funeral. But unlike the studied astrologer who reads meaning into the stars and planets, I don’t know what messages my constellation of memories is telling me. I don’t know how to make sense of their sequence and pattern. They breed only questions — what am I here for? What I have I learned? Who have I loved?

Fifty years, looking back. Maybe fifty years ahead, if I’m lucky. Even with all of the pain and confusion and lost time that inevitably happens, what a rich, rich life this is. To be alive. To live. To love. To be.