Every day we awake from the womb of sleep resurrected from the death of yesterday, born again to the life of today. Every day is our birthday; a day to rejoice, to celebrate, to dance.
Too many of us are caught up in ritual, tradition, and our own ambition; too many of us make the extraordinary ordinary, our every day everyday; too many of us leave the living for the dead.
Each day, for our birthday, the cake of opportunity is baked, the candle of being is lit, the gift of Life presented; but we spit on our cake, blow out our candle, and curse our gift.
Like a spoiled child we pull our hair, cry our eyes, and scream for more, more, more! But our pulling only causes more suffering, our tears only blur beauty, and our screams only express our wildest fear of emptiness, emptiness, emptiness.
What more can be given to us who have it all? What present, what gift, is more precious and valuable than life itself?
We do not wish to understand, instead, like an untamed beast, we the spoiled children of the world work jobs we hate to buy things we don’t need, marry people we don’t love because we fear being alone, and let our beastly roar for more, more, more tear us apart like a internal war.
Do not hit this spoiled child, this untamed beast within, for that will only teach us fear and not wisdom. We must treat the child like an adult, the beast like a human, we must listen to our emotions and thoughts; we must watch as they are created and destroyed, understand how and why they come and go.
Only then can we give birth to a new us, a new child, who is not spoiled, but feels spoiled with all the wonder and joy life offers. Who shares one’s cake with one’s enemies, who kindles others’ candles with one’s own, who blushingly, with gratitude and humbleness, accepts the gift of Life.
Only then will we realize that every day is truly our birthday. That birthdays don’t just celebrate the yearly anniversary of coming from the womb, but the daily regeneration of life’s bloom.