3 March: Boreham On Birthdays

Our Birthdays
Every day is somebody's birthday.[1] It is reasonable to suppose that, here in Tasmania, between five hundred and a thousand people are celebrating the great event today. In every city, town, and settlement in the State:

This is somebody's birthday,
Just as sure as fate;
Some little twins are
exactly two—
Some little girl is eight.
Some one is eating his birthday
cake
And laughing over the plums;
Some one is counting her birthday
dolls
On all her fingers and thumbs.
Some one is bouncing his birthday
ball,
Or winding his birthday watch,
Some one is not too wise or
tall
For birthday butter-scotch.

To all such, the birthday is a notable occasion. However long we live, we never quite lose the romance of the birthday fuss and frolic. And the very fact that each of us, of whatever age or rank, is susceptible to the birthday sentiment, forges a bond of sympathy between us all. One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin. A birthday represents that element of essential humanness which unites a monarch on his throne with the lowliest of his subjects. Each of us has a birthday once a year: each has but one; even the king can have no more.

Charles Lamb, it is true, argues that we each have two; but he admits that one of them belongs to us each only as the stars and the ocean belong to us each: we have private and personal property in it. "Every man," he says, "hath two birthdays, two days at least in every year which set him revolving, the lapse of time as it affects his mortal duration. The one is New Year's Day; the other is that which, in an especial manner, he calleth his." For all practical purposes, the first of these must be ruled out of court. It is a birthday that is no birthday. A child would firmly decline to recognise it; and, in the matter of birthdays, a child is a very high authority.


Our Fondness For The Central Place
To a child, one's birthday is the great day of the year. Even Christmas Day is open to the objection that it lacks individuality: it is everybody's day: it is too universally shared. A birthday, however, is private property. "I do not suppose," says Mr. A. C. Benson, in one of his charming essays, "that one will ever quite recapture the peculiar quality of bliss which flowed in upon the mind when, as a child, one woke up on the morning of one's birthday. It was one's very own day, to begin with, and endowed one, for that single space of daylight, with a certain princely attribute." Mr. Benson proceeds to enumerate the joys of the great anniversary. Everybody was goodnatured and even deferential. One was consulted about every plan, project, and proposal. Then, too, there were the presents. One became a man of property. Mystery, too, invaded the commemoration. There were odd-looking packages to be opened: thrills and surprises to be experienced: all the streams of human felicity seemed to converge in filling one's pool to the very brim.

We are creatures of habit. Having, in infancy, tasted such raptures, we invest all our subsequent birthdays with an aureole of romance. The law of association brings back to our most prosaic birthdays something of the poetry of those earlier ones. And this is all to the good. Some of the old mediaeval philosophers argued that birthdays should be ignored. There is a law, they averred, that ordains that every recognition of the passage of time unconsciously and unpleasantly prolongs it. The hours never seem so long as when we are watching the clock. Forget all about time, and it flies: concentrate your attention on it, and it crawls. Heraclitus in the old days, and Bergson, in our own day, have taught us that the flow of time is largely an illusion, and that its apparent extension or its seeming abbreviation depend almost entirely on ourselves. We get into the way of thinking of time, Bergson says, as though it were so many notches on a stick or so many ticks of a clock. The whole conception, he maintains, is false. There is nothing mechanical in the flight of time. The mechanical element is the element that we ourselves bring to it. Time, he contends, is like the flow of a river, without jerks or jolts, without any arbitrary division into sections, without any distinctive marks or separating stages. In the philosophy of Heraclitus and Bergson birthdays find no place.

Time To Be Measured By Its Intensity
Much of this may savour of highfalutin and special pleading. Emerging from the nebulous realm of the abstract and the metaphysical, however, it is worth while reminding ourselves that life cannot be measured by the number of our birthdays. It does not follow that, because we have been long upon the road we have therefore travelled far. It is possible to make a very great journey in a very short time, and contrariwise, it is possible, like the tortoise, to go a very short distance in a very long while. It is amazing that some of the outstanding figures in history enjoyed so few birthdays. It seems inconceivable that Lady Jane Grey was not seventeen at the time of her tragic death, and that Thomas Chatterton produced his wealth of poesy and went down to his grave before completing his eighteenth year. The list might be indefinitely extended, but it would be superfluous.

The fact is that humanity is so constituted that its progress cannot be measured by any hard-and-fast or cut-and-dried standards. "How old are you?" a gentleman asked a little girl. "Well," the gay little maiden answered, "If you goes by birthdays, I'se five; but if you goes by the fun I've had, I'se most a hundred!" A vast amount of sage philosophy is contained in that reply.
We live in deeds, not years: in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We must count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.

He who makes his birthday the occasion on which he measures his progress and formulates his plans has learned much wisdom in the school of life.

F W Boreham

Image: One of the youngest photos of F W Boreham

[1] Today is F. W. Boreham's birthday.