Blog Bastion Prompt 4

Every year, as one gets older, they have a birthday party to celebrate. But what exactly are we celebrating every time another year goes by?

Now, birthday parties and birthdays, I have a persnickety history with. My perspective of time is very fluid and almost non-concrete. Something that happened three years ago feels like three weeks ago, and I can remember the most obscure detail I learnt last year, but ask me what I wore last week, and I won't be able to tell you. As such, with birthdays, every year, adding one more digit to my age feels more like math and a slight mental adjustment. It’s another thing to get used to as I add more milestones to my inner timeline. And I don’t think I’m the only one. Because we don't just turn 18 or 20 or 30. We grow into it, and once we're there, there's no change because we've already done that over the course of one year; the digit change is the aftermath of that mental change. How much change is another story.

I still feel the same way I felt when I was 15, and I think I haven’t changed much at all. But when I make an effort to look at the last year, and the year before that, I see changes everywhere in my writing, my voice, my face, my intelligence, and my habits. I realize I am much more different and wiser now at 18 than when I was 15, heck even wiser than when I was 17 even. So when another year goes by, we’re celebrating, yes, another year of our life, but birthday parties are also life telling us that we've grown (not just physically) and how far we've come during the past 365 days; we're celebrating change, for better or for worse, celebrating not that we're not just growing older, but hopefully also growing wiser.


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