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Saturday, October 1, 2016

Birthdays & other anniversaries



I awoke this morning to the realisation that I had reached the 77th anniversary of the day I was born. Was I excited? No. After having celebrated 76 of these things you get kind of jaded. That is definitely not how it should be.

When I was a young person when another birthday came around it was celebrated in style. There had to be a party with friends and family gathered around, and it was a big deal. But why? The continuation of life was taken for granted. We were young and indestructible. However, looking back on some of the things we did to celebrate it really wasn't so guaranteed after all.  Especially judging by the next day, or even the next week's hangover I at least wished I were dead.

Now, when birthdays are getting ever more difficult to attain I am laid back and relaxed to the point where I have to be reminded of the coming of the big day. I have concluded that in a sense birthdays are like our own skyscraper. I can relate  to a tall building with 77 floors. Each floor represents one year in my life and is a living museum. Once in a while I return to certain floors for a visit.

  The ground floor contains the front door through which I entered the world. The second, third and fourth floors were vast playgrounds and adventure lands. The fifth floor contained kindergarten. That was a big step up into an all together different world which was scary. That was when I came face-to-face with an introduction to real life.

It is not my intention here to pass individually through each floor, although on certain floors the visit would be more enjoyable than on others, but it is all there to be remembered and accounted for as "My Life." A similar structure exists for each and everyone, and always has although before high rises we could have used the analogy of one long continuous ground level building.

As I write this, through the magic of Facebook my wife is calling out a long list of friends and family who are sending love and best wishes from around the world. The world as it was is moving out of its shell as a place where we all lived in our own compartments, to a world that is truly global. The Internet is responsible for that in one way or another, and English is the language of the Internet. We are all inter-connected through the simple touch of a button so that whatever happens on the other side of the globe can be shared with everybody on this side and in between.

I would have to try extra hard to imagine our world in one hundred years from now. It will undoubtedly be a vastly different place from what it is today. There may be remnants of our culture and customs left, but very hard to recognize.

On the other hand, one hundred years from now there may be nothing at all, as mankind will have succeeded in making a total mess and it will all be gone.

Copyright (c) 2016
Eugene Carmichael