Yesterday was my birthday. I’ve always resisted celebrating, preferring to keep it quiet without ever being really clear what this reluctance was all about. Yesterday was no exception and I spent it very quietly, withdrawn from the world – apart from some quality time with Elena and a couple of phone calls. It’s always been this way and I never understood why. A special day? Not really. Enjoyable? For the most part, not really.
This morning it hit me what this has been all about for the past 45 years. Celebrating on this day (11 November) would be going against the tide of mass remembrance of all the victims of warfare. ‘Veterans Day’, ‘Remembrance Day’, ‘Armistice Day’, ‘Poppy Day’. In Poland it was the 90th anniversary of independence after generations of aggressive occupation and the mood in the capital was somber, respectful, nationalistic in tone and certainly not celebratory.
I believe that all of us human beings are joined together in many subtle threads of unconscious and spiritual connection. I’m not always sensitive to that as I go about my day to day life in this separate physical body of mine. Even yesterday I was kind of ’switched off’ for the most part. That is until I woke up at at 6.00am today with this flash of realisation that every day on 11 November there’s been an unconscious part of me that’s tuned in to this collective reflection, remembering and mourning of the tragedy of war. And for all my life it’s been in conflict with this conscious thought that I ’should be’ celebrating because it’s my birthday. That’s what you do on your birthday isn’t it? Celebrate.
What a relief this is! I thought there was something wrong with me! Well there probably is – but at least not this annual withdrawal from the world. I want to mourn the life lost in war. I want to reflect on the senselessness of killing each other. I want to add my own spirit and voice to the cry of ‘Never Again!’. I want to be in tune with the currents of life around me.
More than this. I want to live in a peaceful world where we solve our conflicts with compassion. I want to live in a world where arming our children and sending them out to kill is abhorrent to each of of us. Where concepts such as sacrifice, duty, ‘country first’ and the glorification of war and death at each other’s hands is a thing of the past.
Today, these things are still very much with us and it’s not much to ask of myself to set aside one day every year to remind myself of these things. I just wish it wasn’t on my birthday!
I suppose celebration can wait until another day!
