The Celebration

Birthdays only make you older

Photo by lil artsy

This month, I’ll be 68 years old. I don’t write this to brag, certainly there is nothing that impactful about 68. And I don’t write this to encourage you to send me Facebook birthday wishes. Not needed. Not necessary. Feels self-indulgent. Birthdays for me were always . . . nice. But I never turned a birthday into a full blown bash or a week-long celebration, as some do. That’s fine, if you need a reason to party. I’ll pass. Yet, birthdays are impossible to ignore. Nearly everyone you know is reminding you.

I love a happy birthday wish as much as the next person. But the celebration of a birthday, at least in my adult years, has perplexed me. One’s birthday, in the bigger sense of the cosmos is rather insignificant. Compare your birthday to all that has happened on this 13-billion-year-old planet, and our individual birthdate has to be considered as an event of little consequence. But, your LIFE? That’s another kind of celebration. And that doesn’t need a birthday to acknowledge it.

Maybe we’re confusing the two—birthdays and life?

I recently came upon a study done a few years ago about how children interpret birthday parties.

The study in Sage Journal’s Imagination, Cognition and Personality discovered that children believe a birthday party is the thing that actually ages them, it’s the celebration of the date and if we don’t “party” we might remain eternally young. So, it’s not the birthday itself, it’s the cake, the candles, and the streamers.

But do we want to stay eternally young? Maybe that’s the curse. Thing is, we don’t have a choice on that front.

So, let’s not celebrate the birth date. Let’s celebrate another day alive. Young people believe they’re immortal. I know I’m not. I know it more every day. And this insignificant birthday of mine coming this month means little to me. I’d rather consider the everyday. It’s not the birthday that should be the reminder that we are still kicking; it’s each day that should be the reminder. An early Sunday morning reading under a low light. A Tuesday afternoon browsing through your favorite bookstore. A quiet dinner with your wife. Pushing your granddaughter on a swing. A phone call from your son who lives 2000 miles away. The text — “I love you dad” — from your younger son. A perfect playlist on a long drive. A backyard fire on an autumn night. A glass of wonderfully warm Irish whiskey. Coffee at 6 a.m. A fine soft day. A sunrise over the pines.

All of this is born out of the idea, the concept, that time is an illusion. No real past; no real future. The only time that is true is TODAY. There is only the present moment, the NOW. Everything else is a perception, a man-made concept, a concept like the birthday celebration. It’s based on the believed fact that time is an exact and true thing that calculates and defines a life. If you agree that this is not the case, then all that we should ever consider is today. Today is the only celebration that matters.

And so, I’m off now on a walk with my wife and the dog through the tree-lined lanes of our town under a silver November sky.

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David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His latest, Daylight Saving Time: The power of growing older is available now. His novella, American Moon will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2026.