The One About…Birthdays

Hearing the phrase ‘Happy Birthday’ said to me is akin to fingernails down a blackboard. Let me explain why.

Hold your index finger in front of your nose, pointing to the sky.

Now close one eye, then open it and close the other. Repeat this a few times and you will see your finger jump left and right.

This is the parallax effect.

The closer something is to you, the greater the effect. The further away it is, the less the effect shows that jump. So something on the other side of the room will appear to move less.

Keep in mind your eyes are only two inches apart.

Tonight, the stars in the night sky will appear in the same position as they did on the day I was born.

Our solar system travels around the Milky Way at a speed of 7 billion kilometres per year. So at my age of 58, the parallax distance between then and now is 421 billion kilometres. And yet the stars look no different.

In fact they look no different to how they did at the time Neanderthals walked the earth and will look the same in a hundred generations. That is trillions of miles parallax and yet they haven’t moved.

This gives some sense of how big our galaxy is. You can travel trillions of kilometres across it and the stars are so far away that they have no parallax effect at all.

At the start of that universe, only hydrogen and helium existed. None of the complex heavier elements like carbon existed. The stuff that makes up you and me. This took the birth and death of countless stars to create and spread this matter to distant parts of the universe, and coalesce over the span of 14 billion years.

All of these particles that make up me have made this incredible journey through 14 billion years, survived through countless generations since the dawn of life itself. They could have ended up in a squirrel or mould, growing on a wall. But they didn’t, they became me.

I am, as are we all, part of the unfathomably large clockwork of the universe, in the span of unimaginable time.

The chance that we even exist at all is against odds that go into thousands of trillions to one.

This rarest of gifts of life, that I have been given is something I would be a fool to squander, and yet I do.

‘Happy birthday’ is not a celebration to me. It is a reminder of how much of my precious and limited time I waste, like I am immortal.

It reminds me how little I have really seen or done, how few great achievements I have to my name, how that precious time is the only thing I have to sell to an employer to make a living. I am a prisoner of a system that makes me sell my life to someone, just to make ends meet.

Happy Birthday reminds me that on a journey of over 400 billion kilometres, I have seen so little along the way.

There have been some momentous and special moments, but on the whole, my time has belonged to someone else. 

Each time I hear ‘Happy Birthday’ I hear the tolling of a bell that marks the squandering of another year. 

When I have earned it, please say it.