Birthdays, New Year's Reflections

Another year down. I was in Budapest this time year last, about to head to London where l'd spend my first couple months aged 31.

I don't tend to reflect on years, maybe for a few moments, maybe to think of where I was last time done coming round the sun.Calendar years tend to weigh more than those from birth. Can feel your heart race just before the ball drops, some strange mix of anxiety and nostalgia. It's felt anew in the moment even though you know it's coming each year.

I don't get that on birthdays. Maybe once or twice a year or two in general. This urge to tell someone something or ask an old girlfriend you once knew how they're doing. Sometimes it's synchronous, they'd been thinking of you too as a matter of fact.You kind of knew they were but couldn't prove it. Then, you check your phone and realize that very day one year or two years back you were on a trip together and nothing but an instinct had reminded you.

Reflection on a birthday doesn't feel natural. Maybe it just doesn't come naturally for me. Why reflect because it's a particular date? I tend to reflect in spurs of moments. Then, I write things down, usually fiction. A short story, a novella, centered around something I suddenly realized happened in my life that reminds me of a Greek myth or some archetype.Sisyphus, Calypso, etc. Only sometimes do I publish it.

Speaking of which, I bought myself a birthday present. A couple of them. One a book on mythology, from the Greeks to the Norse, Zeus to Odin. I've read those stories since I was a little boy, they've never dulled. Bought a collection of James Joyce's short stories too. He knew the Greeks better than most, so well he could caricature them, find the gods in the men, women, and, most importantly, the essence of the Dublin he knew.

I like those topics. The eternal and the ephemeral, the eternophemeral, if you will (or even if you won't). Spontaneity is one of the few things that makes me feel alive. Something unexpected amidst the predictable. You have to live to make those moments. You need consistency and history to frame it all in because without them, how would ephemera be recognizable?

Anyway, another year down, another up. Maybe in a sixmonth or so on an unexpected day I'll smile thinking of something from the present or today's just past that finally dawns on me, something l can't get back. That's hard to predict and I'm glad it is.