Birthday

What is the obsession with birthdays about? Why do we choose to forget that every birthday is a sentence to a death day?

Birth is the lottery of the Universe. Where you are born, to whom you are born, with what genetic characteristics you are born, all these determine your life experience to a great degree. Those, for the most part, who are blessed in birth deny this, but it is true, statistically and scientifically.

So, life itself is a lottery. There are winners and losers on an elemental level. One human reaction to this reality is to claim their winnings are deigned by a Supreme Being. Another is to enshrine their luckier ancestors as deserving of great praise and sanctity. Yet another is to establish and enshrine a genetic dynasty. The losers of life's lottery cope, strive and survive as best they can. If they are fortunate enough or aggressive enough, they may find themselves in a society which believes in social security and economic justice for all. If not, they live and die in hunger, pain and misery.

I have always found birthday celebrations somewhat silly. "Look how wonderful I am." or "Look what a wonderful human being I have made." or "Look at what a wonderful person I have employed or found to love." These have been the undercurrents of all too many birthday celebrations I have observed. While I think applauding, supporting and loving people every day is a worthy practice, I feel uncomfortable when I see celebrations that are lies in settings where the daily practice of love, support and appreciation are badly lacking. These parties often ring of hypocrisy and token compensation for neglect and bad treatment.

I happen to believe my death day is a much more important day, of which to be constantly mindful. It may be today. I think of how different human society would be, if we all were aware of this in every moment as part of our human experience.

Part of becoming a true humanist is embracing the reality of the human condition in your own daily life. Every human being you see has been brought into life unwillingly into circumstances outside his/her control. Most have been brought into life by human beings who have not realistically accepted the grave responsibility of reproduction. They have rolled the dice for the unborn, who must then live with the consequences for a whole lifetime and then die.

This brings great sobriety to bringing another human being to life. I have seen those who have accepted this fully. They are the few exemplary parents I have met. However, I have seen many more birthday celebrations where the true children were the parents, still at sea with what their lives are truly about.

As a totally homosexual man, I have won one lottery, I feel, by not having the biological urge to take the vast staggering, responsibility for fathering another human life. This does give me a very different perspective on birth and death. I do not see myself as somehow becoming immortal through my offspring, for example. This is a concept that seems rather primitive to me, frankly.

I am the genetic offspring of two human beings, but I certainly am not either one of them in consciousness or practice. I would not want to be. It is enough of a burden to live with what I have been left genetically and environmentally through their transmission of various challenges to be overcome. Perhaps, if I had been otherwise gifted, I would feel differently. I understand that. But, I have not, and billions of others on this planet have not. My empathy and compassion is with them.

I have struggled with this question for many years now. I no longer see my displeasure over my birthday as simply neurotic, as I have been encouraged to do by many I know. My practice every year is to use my birthday as a time to meditate on these issues again. And, as the approach of my death day becomes more palpable, my perspective becomes wider and deeper on the randomness and commonality of all life. So much of being human, it seems to me, is choosing to do daily whatever we can to improve on life's accidents for all our fellow beings.