Birthday

I have been receiving a lot of birthday wishes today. Each birthday wish makes me think again about what a birthday really means. It's a particular day of the year when we were born a few years ago. Born in a particular body, we are living right now. Born in a particular year, in a particular month, and a particular day.

Doesn't it sound so divisive? Division of the time into year, month, and day. Starting from a particular moment, we decided to divide the time into years, months, and days. But is the time really divisible? Probably not. It’s just a continuum right from the beginning of the big bank and even much earlier. All the divisions of the time into years months and days are just for our convenience and have limited functional use. Astrologically there is only one similarity each year on this day and that is the position of the sun vis a vis earth. The position of the rest of the planets does not remain the same as it was at the time of birth.

Coming back to birth. I don't know what birth really means. Does it mean coming to existence and such existence comes to an end the moment we die? Indian scriptures say the opposite: birth is like wearing a new dress and death is life throwing away the old one. Assuming that to be true, it would have happened a lot of times. However, I do not remember even the present change of dress leaving aside the earlier ones. I do not have any memories of how I came to this body. If life is also a continuum, why limit the celebration of life to one particular day of changing the dress?

I am not trying to be cynical. Rather I do not wish to restrict the celebration to a particular day of the year. I feel that each moment of life is a celebration. Each moment, we live with the realization that life and time both are a continuum, which is a wonderful moment to celebrate. We celebrate infinite possibilities in each such moment. Each moment, wherein the divisions of time into years, months, and days; and life into births dominate our thinking, we divide different moments of our life into moments of celebration and anguish.

Do we wish to live life on such a low note? A life with certain moments of celebration and the rest of the moments being just routine. Or we wish to celebrate each moment of life. To explore the possibilities of being and live those possibilities. After all, we do not celebrate entering into a hotel room the way we celebrate entering our home for the first time. Rather, we celebrate the carrying out of the task for which we stayed at the hotel. Similarly, I feel that the purpose of life is to create the best possibilities in this world, to live such possibilities, to celebrate the grand play of life, and when the body becomes weak beyond repair, to leave it and move on to the next one. The creation of each new possibility is a real celebration.