oN BiRTHDAYS

September 25, 2020. Following a prolonged hiatus from penmanship, below is the encapsulation of some philosophical musings related to aging. See here a dissection of the birthday, a uniquely human concept.

_____________________________________________

Today I will turn thirty years old.

I attribute as much significance to the day as any other throughout the year: my birthday has never particularly interested me and in fact in years past I’d have been happy to skip it entirely. This dogged apathy reflects my disagreement with the social gravitas the occasion typically commands across contemporary cultures. Birthday festivities, to me, are an absurd distortion of the actual bites of life which ought to evoke a celebratory response.

Consideration must be lent as to why other, common causes of collective recognition hinge on personal achievement and the attainment of major life milestones (those nauseating societal yardsticks, but for another time’s scrutiny), while birthdays land in the same category without the individual having performed any act of worthiness. What other circumstance so thoughtlessly grants us the licence to strut down attention’s catwalk and demand affection from our circle as the anniversary of a day none of us can remember and to which we contributed literally nothing?

This clear misfocus of the birthday spotlight is nonsensical. The only appropriate recipient of any plaudit is the mother, who for nine months preceding houses the fetus and makes innumerable lifestyle sacrifices leading up to the climactic heave-ho. Somehow our conditioning has egregiously reduced her role from lead protagonist to that of faceless extra. For shame that this rings true.

It is to this reason that each year when my Day of Great Insignificance arrives, I divert focus to my mother, the individual who best embodies my conceptual grasp of the term hero and for whose wellbeing I would eat cement. I always send flowers as a reminder that the day centres on her rather than I, and proclaim congratulations on the accomplishment of having birthed a baby stranger and raised him into an adult close friend. My age is irrelevant to the point – I will not amplify my sentiment today simply because 30 is a round integer that looks good written down. (As an aside, the intellectual framework is flipped round on my mother’s own birthday, which she may begrudge, but such emotion would be too high pitched for logic to hear.)

I must make clear that this annual habit is an expression of commendation as opposed to gratitude. I am not thankful for having been born in the first place, for I never asked to be and was not afforded any influence in the matter. Fortuitously I am able to extract pleasure from living, but that is not to say I would not be as equally content not living had I never been born and remained unborn in perpetuity.

As the case is, here I am precisely three decades on, with a healthy mind to explore and a place to journal the findings and I suppose that in itself is worth marking in writing. Well done Mum.