Imagine being in a cozy comfortable place, neither too warm nor too cold. Totally protected from everything. Food delivered directly to your body, dispensing with the need to eat or excrete. No gravity to worry about, no infinite spaces to get lost in - a place that is built around you, specially for you.

And then, after you grow so accustomed to it that it fills your perception and becomes the whole of your experience, imagine being forcibly ejected into a bright, noisy, prodding, poking, too hot or too cold place. Imagine the trauma.

This is what happens at birth. And it is perhaps the most traumatic experience in a person's life. Of course, none of us remembers it, but the scars we carry lifelong. Which is why the great social tradition of celebrating one's birthday evolved. To mask with a happy celebration the memory of that great trauma. When we gather for a birthday celebration, we come together as a species, a very primal kind of bonding. We acknowledge the trauma of the one experience we all share, irrespective of any other divide.

Of course, all this happens at a very sub-conscious level, and on the surface, it's all about partying, presents and friends. It puts a very different perspective on things when one realizes that a light-hearted birthday celebration is as primordial an act as the chanting of druids around a dolmen or the rituals of siththars around their fires.

Cheers.