Happy Birthday To Me (43)

It's my birthday, which is of little interest to anyone, least of all me, but that's what's happening. I was born 43 years ago, in 1982, in Vancouver, Canada. I bounced around with my academic parents until I returned to Sri Lanka at age 21. I've lived a majority of my life here now, but my formative years were there, in White Empire (Canada and America, same thing). Hence my perspective, which is bipolar to say the least.

Between Space

If the meaning of life is 42, I am past it now. If I divide my life into half, and then half again, I have been drawn and quartered across continents, before reassembling with resentment where I am. I spent the first half of my life in the heart of whiteness, and the second half in the heart of darkness, slowly awakening to “The horror! The horror!” as Kurtz said. I went from unwitting colonizer to witty anti-colonizer, if I may say so myself. You can't change where you come from, but you can change where you're going. I think.

I think of how meaningless the change from 42 to 43 is. I can barely remember my age and the change barely registers, but this is the second thing children ask each other. Age is very important, until it's not. Every year is a big deal until you're adult, then it's just something you deal with. I think the Pingala sequence captures how growing up feels, a rapidly ascending geometric progression before it gets too hard. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21.

From 0-3 I was in Canada, then from 3-5 in Sri Lanka, then K-12 in America. I went to university in Canada and then at 21 went back home. Then, slowly but surely, time slowed down. Now I barely feel it passing except through my children, for whom each new year actually brings something new with it, besides new horrors and bodily humiliation. I suppose this is special relativity experienced through special relations. A child, moving fast and full of light, experiences time slowing down. When they come back to earth, however, they see their parents have aged dramatically. Is this really how relativity works? No. But yes, also.

Between Times

I also realize that I've lived more of my life in this century than the last one. That's another part of my perspective. I grew up in Western Civilization at a time that it felt like they had one. I grew up believing all the marketing, before the labels peeled off; revealing old war crimes in new bottles. So many things that I thought were over—colonialism, genocide, war—had just been rebranded, and I'm ashamed to say I bought them. Growing up has been a long process unlearning what I thought I knew, and I'm embarrassed that most of my sources are from centuries ago. It's not that the information wasn't out there. I just thought I knew better cause I read the NYTimes. How wrong I was, and how confidently. But that was just the Midwestern milieu.

I also grew up a futurist, I believed in that also. Politically, technologically, ideologically, I thought I was riding a wave of progress that would only go up. But that was all an illusion, as the Buddha told us thousands of years ago. But I saw a shiny Kurzweil book in the library and followed that to university. I studied Cognitive Science after reaching The Age Of Spiritual Machines and I believed a Singularity was foretold. I now believe this in the opposite way, that we're collapsing into a white hole. Every exponential chart I once read going up (computational power, economic growth), I now read going down (natural resources, ecosystems). As I've said, I was born in the age of fucking around. I'll die in the time of finding out.

43

So here I am, at a particular point in spacetime, 43 times around the sun and only now starting to use sunscreen. At least I married well. Beyond that, I don't know what there is to tell about me. I'm content, which makes me unambitious. And I'm comfortable, which makes me monotonous. I just wake up and write everyday, which is all I wanted to do since I was five, but which doesn't seem like an adult career to any adults. We can spin around and round, feeling like we're going fast and then slow, but when we look around, we haven't moved much at all. A birthday really marks reaching the same spot, not something new. So happy birthday to me. I'm 43 now.