Life - On Birthdays

Life - On Birthdays

Once a year, pretty much every 365 days like clockwork, you get to celebrate for 24 hours the fact that you exist.  It's kind of a peculiar little thing.  You've not actually done anything of real significance to deserve it, other than having continued to consume food and air and just...well living.



We happen to live in a day and age when we don't need to remember certain things anymore.  We are conveniently reminded of life's little events to one another.  At least there are a myriad of systems that will support us in remembering, if we are available that day and connect in the correct way to pay attention to them.

I had a conversation with a classmate today really quickly about it, she asked me if I thought it was depressing that no one had to remember birthdays anymore.  That there was always an automated reminder that was given, all friendly, and a system to immediately communicate, immediately connect to that person.  It was just so quaint, so neatly packaged for us, isn't it depressing?

No.

I think it's exhilarating   It's exhilarating that for the first time (well maybe not the first) but at our moment in time we are all connected in such a beautiful life-sympatico way to one another.  These are avenues of connection, immediate, resounding, understood.  They exist in time and space, fleeting but remembered.  We are treasured in one another's thoughts, conjured in memory and brought into being.  Even if the event of remembering lasts but a scant, fleeting few seconds, there is a choice, a decision to well-wish, to encourage, to recall a shared memory and partake.

We are, in effect when writing on a friend's wall for a birthday or sending them a short little text message, breaking a sort of mental bread with one another.  We are acknowledging that we have passed footsteps in the psyche of memory with each other, that we have and had, and do cross paths, emotionally and connected.

I love the hundreds of messages left at my digital stoop today, phone calls, texts, tweets, and wall postings.  The real life hugs, and the shared words.  I was at school the entire day, hooked into the digital ether and felt so profoundly connected as they came carousing in that it was hard not to be emotional and buoyed in a tide of memory.

Thanks friends.

I lead a blessed life.