Why doesn't it feel like it? Is it simply as selfish a thing as not getting as many presents as we used to when we were children?
Partly I think.
It's increasingly rare that I'm genuinely surprised by a birthday present. Now it's like orchestrating the present giving myself. Being asked what I want has been the bane of recent birthdays, the struggle to think of something that I want and yet something I've not actually wanted enough to buy myself.
Next year I'm going to tell anyone who asks me what they should buy me to just think about me for one minute and make a decision about what they think I want, to ask themselves what do they want me to have. I think that will bring the surprise element back into presents and add a sentimentality that is sometimes lacking.
Ultimately, I never want to receive money in an envelope again. (Unless I'm wearing a pastel blue suit, sitting at a shaded table of a rooftop terrace in Cote d'Azur and am handed a large brown Manilla envelope by a foot runner sent by the Havanan drug cartel).
This probably seems very ungrateful. I'm not ungrateful, I just want birthdays to be less about the material value of a present and more about its meaning. There's just something so impersonal about receiving money in a card.
I understand that since I stopped collecting Thundercats memorabilia its been hard to buy for me. Good news is I've recently put my collectable Star Wars figures into cryonic storage and so have a space on my shelf to begin afresh. Between you and me, I'm more and more interested in the early GI Joe figurines, circa 1984 (hint for next year).
Looking at the above image does make me wish there was something that could get me as pant-shittingly excited as I used to about opening toys.
Aside from presents though, I think there's something else that compels us to underplay birthdays as we get older. And that's simply just the passing of time and not wanting to recognize or fully bring to light the fact that, according to the Roman calendar, we are one year older.
Why do we need to measure our lives like this, crossing out years with each passing birthday. What true significance does it have?
I messed around a fair bit when I was in secondary school. Particularly in chemistry (no pun intended). But the most valuable thing I think I could of learnt in that lesson was just a passing remark said off the cuff by my teacher (as we were leaving the class room I think) and it hit my infantile little mind like a lightning bolt. It's about the only thing I've ever remembered from that class. He said...
time is just a conceptual notion which we use to measure our own existence
For me that line is like poetry. It shatters the illusion of a structured, ordered, manageable universe that man can understand and control. It evokes the idea of measuring time as being a futile and tyrannical thing to do, typical of a species that wages global wars with one another.
I'm not such a purist as to think that we should abandon the idea of time altogether. It's a necessity for farming to have a system of harvest. But that's just seasonal. The natural calendar of seasons.
Our time on the other hand, by that I mean manufactured time, the clock that we live our lives to, is like a dictatorship. It shackles, constrains and imprisons what we call time into little cells of hours, minutes, seconds, split seconds, nano seconds etc.
It makes me wonder if viewing the world like this has had an impact on our own minds. Does the breaking down of time into sections affect the way our minds work? Has the evolution of the human mind been affected, or even, is it being affected by the categorization of time?
Imagine what the impact would be if we removed the clock from our lives. Of course, initially, the world would be in turmoil. Everything would collapse.
But eventually civilization could rebuild itself and humans might be able to live simply, by day and by night, and according to the four seasons, independent of the tyranny of clocks.
Just a thought.
Regarding the birthday presents of childhood again... Although I don't really collect Thunderbirds memorabilia and was merely jesting about wanting to collect GI Joe figures, I do yearn for this object still. Someone in my house threw it away years ago, discarded it like ordinary household trash...
Yes, Lion-O's Sword of Omens.
Thunder... Thunder... Thunder... Thundercats... Hoooooooo!
