September 17, 2012

A Birthday is a balance between Life and Death

delicious poutine and bacon, from 131 Water Kitchen and Bar (Gastown)

For the one plus mid-century birthday this year, I decided to spend a quiet day with the three most important people in my daily life: my immediate family, my life coach / mentor, and my boyfriend. For each of these days were centered around delicious food, and those intimate conversations that we can only find in our daily hurried lifestyle with those who understand our secret worries and care about the well-being of our physical, mental and spiritual health. Overall, I’ve been trying to build these little actions and thoughts  that occur on a daily basis within myself. For example, focusing on not allowing worries and negative thinking to consume my consciousness, and practice, practice towards developing a series of steps towards mindfulness that will reflect these goals.

From my initial impressions, the celebrations of birthdays tend to gradually lessen as the numbers increase in length for our duration on Earth.  And yet, the reasons that we choose to announce (or keep quiet on) the date that we were ushered into the world, 9 months late after conceived from our dual parental heritage, is also a strange misfortuned calculation of how many years we have left to linger. Our intimate relationships with immediate friends and family is a reflection of who we choose to celebrate our birthdays with, and these bonds with others, with our own little slice of humanity’s vast population, is one of the reasons that I think we focus on creating large, elaborate and/or ornate birthday celebrations.

In my opinion, humans are always aware of their mortality, and Death. The method of celebrating birthdays and creating happy, wonderful, exciting and thoughtful moments and later, memories, is the method of how we counter the reminder that someday we, too shall die. Ie. In regards to our awareness of mortality, I believe that we can counter the influence of sorrow, that is experienced by those who remain after we have died, with a happier memory of us while we were alive. Material possessions, financial legacies and memories do continue on past the grave but in a lesser fashion, something that is not immediately entwined with our “sense” of self. Our intimate bonds and relationships for those whom we cared for and cared for us is the most important part of humanity, or so I find. Social credibility and personal opinion is one of the primary currencies of our economic system, and our bond with our species.

Irregardless of these serious and long-winded thoughts, at the end of this month I’ll be hosting a relatively medium-sized birthday celebration at one of the pubs in downtown Vancouver, with friends and social acquaintances that are privy to Facebook invites. Though there may be a serious lack of photographic evidence of the evening’s escapades, I hope that each person who chooses to be in attendance will be a collaborative creator in creating a happy evening, a collective mental snapshot of a soon-to-be happy memory.