Birth Day

Birth Day

    We all have them, this annual trip around our sun that marks yet another year passing in our lives.  We call them birthdays, the day on which we were born and the day that says yet another year has passed.  Put more succinctly, I was reading in The Secret Language of Birthdays that: If one considers astrology to be heaven-based, personology is earth-oriented.  That is, the basic structure upon which personology is built is that of the year as it is lived, and as far as we know has largely been lived here on earth.  The rhythms of the year are mostly determined by the changes of the seasons themselves, along with the lengthening and shortening of the days and nights.  Each year these solar changes are roughly the same.  We are fixed to a wheel of life here on earth...The great psychologist C.G. Jung was fond of reminding us of the natural rhythms of nature and of the fact that certain plants, animals., even shapes and ideas come forth at different times of the year.  Similarly, it was no surprise to him that certain types of people should be born at certain times of the year as well.  Jung emphasized that man does not stand outside of the natural order.  Or do we?  Animals don't seem to care about birthdays or growing older, or at least not to our way of thinking.  Why do birthdays so fascinate us?  Indeed in earlier times, making it to your first birthday was a momentous occasion and meant that despite all of the threats of disease and such, your child would likely continue to survive; in many countries (even in the state of Hawaii), this tradition continues, the birthday party for the one-year old child often larger and more elaborate than any other birthday which will follow.  But enough of that...the other night found my wife and I celebrating with friends who had reached the point where age no longer mattered, in a sense.  It was our birthdays and that was reason enough to celebrate.

    In the late 1950s, Pete Seeger penned some words from the Bible and made it into the popular song, Turn, Turn, Turn (To Everything There Is A Season), one which went on to be recorded by many different artists.  A portion of his lyrics reads: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven -- A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted -- A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up -- A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance -- A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.  Michael Kinsley, upon learning that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's (although he notes that when one first hears of the disease, one tends to think of Michael J. Fox, although others such as Billy Graham, Pope John Paul II, Muhammad Ali and Hitler also suffered with it), he could have easily given into the statistics (and for those of you who are my age or older, you may wish to stop reading now because the following will do nothing to boost your expectations).  In his book, Old Age A Beginner's Guide, he writes: We are born thinking that we'll live forever.  Then death becomes an intermittent reality, as grandparents and parents die, and tragedy of some kind remove one or two from our own age cohort.  And then, at some point, death becomes a normal part of life--a faint dirge in the background that gradually gets louder.  What is that point?  One's crude measure would be when you can expect, on average, one person of roughly your age in your familty or social circle to die every year.  At that point, any given death can still be a terrible and unexpected blow, but the fact that people your age die is no longer a legitimate surprise, and the related fact that you will die, too, is no longer avoidable...With some heroic assumptions, we can come up with an age when death starts to be in-your-face.  We will merge all sexual and racial categories into a single composite American.  We will assume that there are 100 people your age who are close enough to be invited to your funeral...Anyway, the answer is 63.  If a hundred Americans start the voyage of life together, on average one of them will have died by the time the group turns 16.  At 40, their lives are half over: Further life expectancy at age 40 is 39.9.  And at age 63, the group starts losing an average of one person every year.  Then it accelerates.  By age 75, sixty-seven of the original one hundred are left.  By age 100, three remain.

    Still., as so many of us both young and old feel, we have many years left, an almost infinite amount (okay, not really but also not so few that we feel we might not wake up tomorrow).  But there was no denying that, as author Kinsley wrote: ...At every stage of life, some people seem older or younger than others of the same age.  But only in life's last chapter do the differences get enormous.  We are not shocked to see a seventy-one-year-old hobbling on a cane, or bedridden in a nursing home, and we are not shocked to see a seventy-one-year-old running for president...It's easy to imagine two sixty-year-olds, friends all their lives.  One looks older because he's bald--no big deal.  Ten years later, when they're seventy, the bald one has retired on disability and moved into a nursing home.  The other is still CEO, has left his wife for a younger woman, and, in a concession to age, takes a month off each year to ski.  Contrasts like this will be common.  Almost 3 percent of Americans older than sixty-five are residents of nursing homes, and for those older than eighty-five the figure is just over 10 percent...The odds look reassuring--even among the very-oldsters, it's only one out of ten.  
 
     Some friends of ours, nearing their eight decade on this planet, just returned from an extensive camping trip (camping, as in the kind with tents and little else other than a portable camping stove for making coffee in the morning).  For them, birthdays are meant for celebration and not for following the pack (or the statistics).  Their camping trip was alone time and yet it was time even more precious, that of being together, a subject I pondered a bit in an earlier post.  To them, a birthday was a marker yes, a passage of time, but also yet another reason to celebrate life itself.  With this friend's 80th birthday celebration upcoming, and mine and my other friend's just retreating, it was and will be a time to wonder why we were all born when we were, what season, what reason, why here and now and not in some other distant corner of the world or time or space.  What were we meant to bring into this world...our thoughts, our smiles, our love?  Surely not our anger and bullets and cynicism...or was all of that necessary as well, a balance, the yin and the yang?  It's a personal question, one meant for ourselves to answer...if we can.  And maybe that becomes the real reason to celebrate a birthday...or to celebrate in general.*


*Want to see life even faster?  Jump to this TED Talk on capturing an entire day in one photo...