There is a certain terror that accompanies the rudimentary nature of our being. And I guess it took me nineteen years to arrange these words, these feelings, onto a piece of paper.
Like any birthday, this one left as abruptly as it came. Like any birthday, I tried to coexist amidst its insufferable contradictions. Birthdays are simultaneously the mourning of an end and the celebration of a beginning. It marks the end of childhood (long lost, I know) and the beginning of adulthood (I’m mired in it, I know). It is the grieving of all that we once were, and a crystallizing hope for all that we aspire to become. It is perhaps one of the greatest contradictions that life has to offer us: a funeral and birth conspired into one lap around the sun. At least, that’s the dramatized form of it.
What I struggle to understand, every year, is why birthdays ought to carry any meaning at all. Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously writes in 100 Years of Solitude, “Everyday is Monday.” Taylor Swift sings in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”, “I act like it’s my birthday everyday.” These questions, eliciting poetically elusive resolutions, have time and time again been expressed by some of the greatest writers, poets and singer/songwriters of our time. So, why do they continue to charm us? Why do they continue to plague us?
The easy answer lies in the idea that we ought to celebrate our existence, and that of others. The more challenging one, however, lies in a kind of revealing that is far more intrusive.
Having a determined day to celebrate our being has become an excuse to take the rest of our days for granted. Professor Lowry Pressly’s words, a short remark at the end of my tech ethics seminar rings clearer each day, “Like the flip of a switch, we just expect the light to turn on. We have come to expect things.” We are continuously ensnared in the trap of believing that everything will always come — today and tomorrow — as they are. We forget the fundamental impermanence of all things.
We readily neglect the “insignificant” moments that weave themselves into the story of our lives, until the things we prescribe as “important” have been submitted to canvas — we have become so submissive. In turn, we are blind to the beauty that resides before our eyes amidst neverending deadlines: assigned dates ascribed to assigned meanings. We convince ourselves that they hold meaning.
I try not to think about all that I forget to celebrate. But I ought to. And so do you. Birthdays have become an excuse to reject celebrating the wealth of joy that exists in everyday, mundane magic.
I’m not trying to say that birthdays don’t carry any meaning or that they shouldn’t. Certainly, they do. Certainly, we should celebrate ourselves and our loved ones — especially when they inspire a gathering that reminds us of our tethered truths. This beautiful and sacred tradition should be protected, but we must recognize a wrinkle to this truth. A random day out of the year shouldn’t justify a self-inflicted starvation of the everyday promise that reveals itself to us — if only we look, if only we live. So don’t wait 365 days to celebrate the gift of life. After all, we are always just beginning.