So I took a few days off to celebrate — well, celebrate isn’t the right word — to observe a milestone in my life. I have now officially been alive for a full half of a century. Five long decades. Fifty years, blowing past me in a blink of an eye, it seems.

That’s right, time seems to fly by, and yet when I look back over all that’s happened, it’s amazing I could fit it into just fifty years. Not that I’ve had such noteworthy adventures or anything, but, that’s a lot of days.

On one of those many, many days, I watched a TV show where Oprah was interviewing Michael Jackson. I think it was Michael’s 35th birthday. (Michael Jackson is the same age as me!). She asked him, “After 35 years, what do you know for sure?” And he said he didn’t feel sure of anything. That always sort of bothered me — do we ever know anything for sure? Things I thought I knew for sure at 35 I’m not sure of any more.

So recently I started making a list. It turns out I’m sure about quite a few things. Too much for one post, but you’ll be seeing some of them soon.

Meanwhile, I read earlier this afternoon that life is just a series of days. And in the long run, I think, it’s the little ordinary days that contribute the most to the meaning and happiness of life. Turning fifty is a big day — so is getting married, having kids, graduating from school, days like that. There are lots of difficult big days too, funerals and breakups and the day I left my parents’ home. Those are the days that anchor the years, that mark off eras.

But the depth of experience, the real good feelings, are in the ordinary days. Like when one of your favorite songs come up on the radio. Those rare meals that make other food seem like imitations. Watching Star Trek with the boys. The smell of roses from flowers that grew in my own yard. Watching the sun set over the lake when I was a kid. The way the dogs get so excited to see me, even if I’ve just been in the bathroom for a couple of minutes.

It’s kind of lucky that those days are ultimately so important, because there are a lot more of them.