A Birthday Wish

A birthday is heaven's gratitude to a year of success and achievement...or not. Can you say that some have never tasted the richness of life - their golden wish of passing wasted with despair?


We say "success" is wealth and luxury; the greatest highlight in our timeline the day we finally could afford to splurge on a car. Our cup of happiness is filled each day, then finally diluted into other objects, inanimate, or not. I often ask my friends, "What makes you happy?" Their replies are slightly cliche in a way, always the usual "friends, family, lace, bubble baths, e.t.c." But if such charms someday disappeared, would your happiness disintegrate with it? Would the ripples of fire ever reverberate to you ever again?


Birthdays were once the few days in a year when we actually made time to muse and ponder about what life meant to us - the sheer joy we saw through it. We used to allow the pendulum  to unobtrusively slip away because it did not matter. What would matter if you were happy with yourself, after all?


Now, celebrations are held on that cherished date every 365 days, the homage we should be paying muted in the background. The cheerful attitudes presented to the guests are nothing more than a false array of smiling faces, like mist that deceives the horizon. Yet, we are actually giving our energy toward a much undesirable goal -  greed. Extravagant food and newfangled gifts...all to the feet of Want and Ignorance.


When we say that we are "better-off" than someone else, is the truth really lying? The simple are content with a wind-smoothed pebble, the complex need a flawless diamond. But while the two objects are a world away in value, they both, in short, are rocks.


So, have some people never experienced happiness? Maybe, but perhaps it is because they have never found it inside their hearts. May the future dawn brighter and the past guide the way, but let the present unfold its meaning. Forever and always. ஐ