Birthdays

I have always had issues about birthdays. Even as a child, I had difficulty understanding why everyone made such a big deal about them. Maybe this is a function of my being innately homosexual and not at all drawn to the process of human reproduction. Maybe it has deep Freudian roots associated with a difficult birth. Maybe it is a function of sharing a birthday time, within two days, with my mother, who was notoriously stressed by her own birthdays. Maybe it is about all these things.

I have struggled to be gracious in response to birthday attention from friends. I'm afraid I have not always been so good about it. It is an ongoing process of acceptance and understanding that their sharing their own enthusiasm for birthdays is well intentioned. I do not think they are necessarily as understanding or accepting of my distaste for obsession over my natal date. This is the lot of the nonconformist.

As I have aged into a present awareness of my own ending, my distaste for birthdays has also mellowed and aged into an appreciation of good reason for eschewing birthday obsession. The aging brain is drawn to its past like a falling body is drawn to earth. Birthdays only accelerate this process. Reminiscence is the poison of aging minds, in my opinion. Remaining focused on the road ahead is daunting, for it promises pain, deteriorating health and death. Walking backwards is not a viable alternative in my mind. It inevitably leads to a bad end.

So, I now approach birthdays as another threshold, a reminder that I am traveling on. What is completed and done can fall away to history, good or ill. What is important is what I can do in and from this moment to be a better human being. In my opinion, that is all I have to hope for on my journey to its end.