Our Birthday

One day, two birthdays, and a forest full of orangutans

There was a time when my birthday felt like a national holiday. When you’re a kid, the day arrives with the quiet assumption that the universe has been preparing for it all year. Cake appears. People call. You are, for twenty-four hours, the main character.

Somewhere along the way that changed. By my thirties, my birthday had become a mature inconvenience — another date to acknowledge politely, like daylight savings or a dentist appointment. I developed the habit of minimizing it. If someone asked what I was doing, I’d say, “Nothing special,” and I wore that sentence like a badge.

Then Facebook arrived and ruined my philosophy.

Suddenly hundreds of people were wishing me happy birthday, many of whom I hadn’t spoken to in years. At first it felt ridiculous. Then, unexpectedly, it felt nice — not because the messages were deep, but precisely because they weren’t. Most were the digital equivalent of a nod in the hallway. And it turned out that being remembered casually, by people with no particular reason to remember you, lands differently than being remembered deeply. It asks nothing of you. It just says: you’re still here, and someone noticed.

That was the first crack in my anti-birthday identity. The second was almost embarrassingly obvious: I could make the day whatever I wanted. There was no birthday committee deciding how meaningful it was allowed to be. If the day felt ordinary, it was because I had decided it was ordinary.

I’d been reading about existentialism around then — the wonderfully uncomfortable philosophy that took hold after World War II, when the world no longer felt particularly trustworthy. Its core idea is that life has no inherent meaning, and that this is not a tragedy but an invitation. So I did something out of character.

I started telling people it was my birthday. Not in a needy way. Just casually. “It’s my birthday today.”

People smiled. They asked questions. Conversations opened that never would have otherwise, and strangers became temporary friends. The day felt lighter, more alive — not because anything extraordinary had happened, but because I’d given it permission to matter.

That was the year my birthday stopped being a date and started being a choice.

Later, life added a twist almost too on-the-nose to be real. June 11th isn’t only my birthday. It’s also my wife Rani’s. Out of all the days in the year, we landed on the same one. And once again, instead of treating it as coincidence, we decided to give it meaning.

So we got married on our birthday.

Which means today is not only my 56th birthday and Rani’s 49th. It’s our birthday. And it’s our nine-year anniversary. Three reasons to celebrate, stacked on the same square of the calendar — not because fate demanded it, but because at some point we realized we were allowed to make life more meaningful simply by deciding it was.

This year we’re celebrating in the Borneo rainforest, walking through wet heat and the racket of insects to find orangutans in the canopy. If the day is going to matter, it might as well matter in a jungle.

So today I’m not minimizing anything. It’s my birthday. It’s Rani’s birthday. It’s our anniversary. It’s June 11th, in the middle of a forest. And the only reason it feels special is that I finally stopped pretending it wasn’t.

PS: As I read this to Rani, she said, “God gave you another year. Make it count.” So that’s the plan — a forest, an anniversary, and for twenty-four hours, two main characters.