Why Some Find not Having a Birthday a Blessing
The Blessing of Birth and the Expenses of the Celebration
A few days before my twenty-fourth birthday, my officemates teased me of the incompleteness of the month of February. I defended ourselves by saying that February is, in fact, exact. It has exactly four weeks, no more, no less, at least for an ordinary and non-leap year.
The story seems to change in a leap year though. After all, during leap years, February loses its exactness by the addition of one day to the exactly four weeks of a February in an ordinary year. In our defense, at least February is trying to be like the other months by coming closer to the thirty or thirty-one days of the other months.
This was how birthdays on leap years were brought up in our discussion. It is hard to discern when to celebrate your birthday when you are born on the twenty-ninth of February, a day that appears, at the most, every four years in the Gregorian calendar.
While I was contemplating the sadness, and perhaps the difficulties, experienced by those who get to grow a year older each year, but who only celebrates his birthdays every four years, one of my officemates remarked that whoever that person is, he is lucky. I wondered why someone who gets to experience his/her birthday a fewer number of times than the rest would be considered lucky.
Apparently, it is because he can escape from treating his office mates in a birthday blowout for himself. While it might be possible, I brought up the sadness that comes with kids being teased for not being able to celebrate his birthday for a given year. Maybe the celebrant had grown apathetic that he did not really care. Maybe the celebrant had grown used to celebrating his/her birthday at a different date. Maybe, maybe...
The comment of my officemate alarmed me. His comment on being born lucky because of the lower number of occasions he would have to treat his friends seemed out of place. Or is it?
Perhaps this is how many think nowadays. Perhaps this is how people consider events which are meant to bring joy, laughter and warmth. Perhaps this is how the world has grown cold. But we may choose to say no to such materialistic inclinations. We may choose to enjoy life as it is. We may choose to see the significance in the celebrations that we have, and learn to live life as children do.
