Tomorrow I'll be officially another year older.
One of the idiosyncrasies of human kind is our need to mark it out with milestones, events, celebrations; birthdays, funerals, weddings. Is it that we fear that one day, we'll look back and realise that we haven't amounted to anything? Are these somewhat superficial and contrived occasions the things that define our lives? Or is it simply that as a race we generally welcome any kind of excuse to have a party?
Whatever your personal response to that may be, it seems to me that the inescapable fact of the matter is that we do have some kind of basic need (that perhaps once wasn't quite so basic, that has slowly interlaced itself into the accepted status quo of society) to mark out our lives with these decisively inconsequential events in some kind of attempt to bring significance, importance and a sense of grandeur to our lives. And I think that's absolutely fantastic.
Many go through their lives constantly racking their brains with the idea of us being so small, so alone and insignificant in comparison to the vast expanse of the universe, but surely our own insignificance is what makes us so incredibly unique? We were put here (when I say 'put' I am not referring to any kind of involvement from a supreme being, I don't want to start any sort of theological debate) on earth and simply left to survive. But the breathtaking thing about it was we didn't just survive, we prevailed.
William Faulkner was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, perhaps even of all time, and he puts this so much more eloquently than I ever could do-
"I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
Too often I hear people saying they have no faith in humanity. Why is this? Is it because the media constantly bombards us with images of destruction? Or is it closer to home than that? Is it because people simply aren't willing to love? The narrator of the film adaptation of 'War and Peace' states that "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." What right do we have to complain when we're not taking any kind of decisive action to change the world we live in?
