Birthdays are like life's little high fives that you survived another year.
Some notables, particularly monarchs, have an official birthday on a fixed day of the year, which may not necessarily match the day of their birth, but on which celebrations are held.For Example:
Jesus Christ's Birthday is Celebrated as Christmas.
But I am no
Jesus Christ and my birthday is on 14th January,
which coincidentally is a Makar Sankranti.
Makara
Sankranti is one of the
most auspicious occasions for the Hindus,
and is celebrated in almost all parts of India.It
is a harvest festival.
Makara means Capricorn Zodiac Sign and Sankranti means
transition of the Sun from one zodiac sign to another. Thus Makar Sankranti is
the day that marks the transition of the Sun into Makara rashi (Capricorn) on
its celestial path.The
day is also believed to mark the arrival of spring in India.
Makara Sankranti is a solar event making it perhaps the only
Indian festival whose date always falls on the same day every year: 14 January,
with some exceptions, when the festival is celebrated on 13 January or 15
January.
It’s hard to
not connect birthdays to aging once you reach the mid-forties. Is that really
how old I am?
They say,Age
is just a number…and truly so..
A co-blogger
who writes under his pseudo name Whatho describes the age very succinctly.
"The
youngest atom in the body is more than a billion years old. Hydrogen, the most
abundantly found element, is nearly 14 billion years old and was produced
during the Big Bang. Carbon and oxygen atoms are between 7 and 10 billion years
old. In other words, we are really really ancient. What’s another 20 or 46 or
72 years in this cosmic scheme of things?
Cells
in our body die every second and new ones replace them. In a sense, we are
re-created with each passing moment. A liver refreshes itself in 3 months.
Taste buds in 2 weeks. The lung’s surface in 3 weeks. The heart refreshes 2-3
times over a lifetime. Cells in the intestine in 2 days. In fact, only our eyes
are as old are we are, not undergoing transformation over time.
So we
are made of ancient cosmic dust but renew ourselves in some cases as often as
every 2 days and sometimes never?"
So how
old did you say I was?
45 years?? 2days?? or14 billion years old??
Okay. Didn’t
I say that age is just a number?
Birthdays
for sure makes you nostalgic.
“Nostalgia is not very good news for the nostalgic. The elegy
of age lies a layer below the surface, trying hard but unable to hide. As the
present hurries along towards the future at its usual frenetic pace, the draw
of the past persuades one to pause in contemplation, unredeemed by any
practical definition of utility. But nostalgia is not the sadness of an end; it
is search, melancholic maybe, for nuggets in the rubbish dump of time”.
Birthdays like new year resolutions are the season to take
stock of your life, to reflect on what was, and the endlessly optimistic possibilities
of what can be
Self-restraint, willpower and commitment are those annoyingly
mocking adjectives that everybody else seem to embody except you yourself,
which seemingly is really frustrating. But didn’t the great Aristotle say “We
are what we repeatedly do”
So the resolution of this birthday:remain the way you
are apart from a slight twitch here or there. Plan something doable since you
can’t change yourself in one burst…If you haven’t succeeded in changing yourself all these years
you won’t in future too…
Live life king-size…that being my mantra I am galloping into
the future one year at a time…
Your Wishes and Blessings Solicited.
I am not Ageing,I am Marinating :-)
Happy Birthday to me.!!
Happy Birthday to me.!!
