Happy Un-Birthday

by Madeleine Kando

It's my birthday today. Everyone expects me to be happy on the one day in the year when I cannot ignore how old I am. The rest of the year, when I can delude myself about my age, I am happy, but then my birthday comes along and everything gets ruined.

What is it about birthdays anyway? I suppose it is a way to celebrate the day we were given life, but then why not celebrate that gift every day? Isn't every day of our lives a new gift? The Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland had it right: there are 364 un-birthdays and only one birthday in a year to celebrate. Some religions even forbid celebrating birthdays, because they see it as turning attention to the self, away from God. Celebrating birthdays has a pagan origin, which God doesn't like. It is rooted in astrology and only Kings and other important people had birthdays. People like you an me had to wait a few centuries to get our birthdays.

Birthdays do have a useful function, however. They help us set social and developmental markers through life, they tell us when to start drinking and voting (usually they go together) and when we enter adolescence or middle age. They are like notches on the measuring stick of our life. It is also a cruel reminder of how many notches we have left.

But what is it that we are measuring, exactly? Are we measuring the reality of our own existence or a view of ourselves imposed by conventional expectations? Who says that we are all born with a certain amount of 'time', like a handful of pocket change that we are told to spend wisely? When someone is ready for retirement, a big chunk of their change is already spent, hopefully 'wisely', on a brilliant career, on having raised children, on having earned enough money for their golden years, while bouncing a happy grandchild on their knees? Does it mean that if one hasn't accomplished all that, celebrating a birthday is not a happy event?

Maybe it is not a matter of counting and adding years at all. Maybe birthdays are a contingency of one's life, a happy accumulation of all the days that one is walking out into a garden, uncombed, unwashed, marveling at the new growth, of days waking up to see the whole world covered with a layer of fresh, virgin snow, of mornings waking up with a soar throat, a hangover or a pounding heart because one is late for work.

Counting our age is something we do in 'public time', where all our watches are synchronized. In our 'personal time', our age is very different. Our watches all run at different speeds. In personal time, my right hand is a lot older than my left hand, considering how much more I have been using it over the years. I am blissfully unaware of my 'age' in personal time. I spend most of my days happily ignoring how much change I have left in my pocket, reminding myself that every single day is the beginning of the rest of my life. I don't care how many notches I have left. leave comment here