Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up…now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.

― Alan W. Watts

I’ve never been all that wild about birthdays.

Nevertheless, I guess what occurred on December 5th, 1960 at Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital in Greensboro, N.C. was indeed a fairly momentous occasion…

one that was definitely…against all odds.

But what’s really the big deal about celebrating it every 365 days?

each one drawing me closer and closer to that final…

celebration.

Kind of morbid, don’t you think?

Well, that is, unless and until you consider what “birth” really means.

We speak of birth in all sorts of contexts…

• the birth of a nation…
• spiritual birth…
• and rebirth…
• the birth of an idea…

The launching of any thing new into our conscious existence can be spoken of as a “birth.”

Maybe the term “birth” is just a semantical construct we’ve developed to help us make sense of things that really don’t make any sense to us at all?

Are the things our limited minds see as being “new” really as old as the universe itself?

Consider the element called argon. The air we breathe is made up of 1% argon. But the thing about argon is that when we breathe it in, our bodies don’t absorb it…we just breathe it right back out…

and it floats along until the next respiratorily-oriented creature gulps in the 400 million or so molecules that had passed through our own system.

In fact, the argon molecules that you are breathing in right now are perhaps the same ones…

that Ghandi breathed in and out…

and Genghis Kahn…

and Christ…

and the T-Rex.

So, what’s the argon conclusion…er…my point, you ask?

It also tends to mark our seemingly singular existence as something separate from everything else.

A predominantly western concept that really flies in the face of reality.

So, why should I wait a whole 365 days to celebrate something that is actually re-occurring all the time?

I mean, am I the same fishy “thing” that breathed in symbiotic fluid for nine months until making that short trip down that slippery slope called the birth canal?

Did the dramatic evolutionary jumps that led to the sentient being that I am now occur on December 5th of each year until the present one?

I don’t think so.

My birth and death occur in every instant…in one form or another.

In fact, that process will continue long after this molecular construct that I can look into the mirror and acknowledge as me becomes dust in the wind.

Birthdays can be depressing as we get older.

They bring thoughts of shedding that mortal coil…

But, perhaps, the coil is not mortal at all.

Maybe the coil is part and parcel of this great and vast universe that has no beginning and no, at least foreseeable, end.

Nevertheless, it’s pretty cool to have your existence acknowledged by folks, some of whom you barely know, once a year.

And to have an excuse to go out and burn a few brain cells.

Your birth, according to traditional usage, was a physical event that occurred once against astronomical odds of it ever occurring at all…

in that sense, sure go ahead and celebrate it.

The fact that we exist at all on this tiny blue planet in the midst of the trillions of others in this vast solar system…

is against astronomical odds.

Granted, there will be a corollary event one day, much more likely, certain even, to occur than was your birth…

But that “event” simply marks another beginning.

To what?

Well, only the universe knows.

image credt: Gonzalo Merat via Compfight cc