What are all the candles for?
Some words before I blow out my candles for the 24th time.
As my birthday draws closer, I can’t help but attempt a recollection of the thoughts I’d conjure up whenever it was time for me to blow out the candles every year. After all those birthdays – twenty-three iterations of them so far, to be exact – the answers all point toward…nothing.
I mean, it’s not that I’m completely thoughtless for the entire candle-blowing gaiety in all those years. But, if we’re being realistic, it’s never easy to figure out what you want to wish for in that taut window of time of when your eyes are closed, your mind ruminating on your heart’s greatest desires, while being well aware that everybody’s staring back at you half-wishing you’d just hurry up already because that hunk of tiramisu before you looks like the stuff of dreams. Eventually, I’d just end up dispatching to the birthday gods the first all-encompassing positive thing, albeit disingenuous, to come to mind and get on with the distribution of cake already. A Marie Antoinette, if you will. After all, the dining table is simply not the proper avenue to contemplate over a question as loaded as “What are you wishing for?”
Come to think of it, I’m not entirely sure if it’s getting consistently easier or harder to come up with that Something to wish for as I hang more candles on my belt. It was certainly easier back in the innocence of childhood, a point in time when all I’d really thought of looking after was for everybody’s happiness and mine, which implied the hot, new Transformers set on the market. That or how I could have the best year ever with no necessary plan outlined because as a kid, a lot of stuff is actually out of your hands responsibility-wise. The beauty behind the ignorance – a lot of the uglier crevices of anything are hidden from you, and the mere childlike wonder of a world still largely unexplored brings enough comfort and youthful exuberance to last a couple more birthdays.
Until it doesn’t, but such is growing older. You get smarter, you get taller, but the world around you expands exponential, as if you’ve unlocked a new accessible region in the map from a video game upon blowing out the candles. Fshhh. The camera pans out to the map in which that very same smoke soon envelops, an element that seems symbolic of the uncertainty of another year. The black and white you knew as a kid coalesces closer and closer into a large pool of gray. I swear I imagined this lightning screenplay to be better when I thought of this metaphor.
Steering this video game metaphor into a more positive light, I say there must always be a reason as to why we soldier on an adventure even as the smoke thickens. I began subscribing to the pursuit of a North Star – a guiding vision that remains constant as you trudge along the journey. This could take the shape of a principle, an idealized version of yourself in the future, or simply put, just something you want to achieve down the line. In recent years, in my own expedition into adulthood, I’ve grown more cognizant of the importance of re-centering myself towards that vision. The most difficult days, in retrospect, were the ones where I got too caught up with the qualms of the present and failed to look at situations from a bigger picture. But as soon as I stepped back and looked up again for that compass, I began planning for and doing the things that align with my North Star.
I realize: I don’t believe that it’s necessarily getting either easier or harder to know what you wish for; that’s highly dependent on our completely different yet equally valid trajectories in life. What gets more difficult for certain is staying true to your North Star, that one thing deep inside that you know you’re meant for. All of a sudden, the good gets tougher to do, the stuff you thought you were meant for feels subject to change. All of a sudden, you find yourself having to make practical compromises – possibly filtering out your large pool of wishes one by one – for some cause. It’s tough to be stubborn with your North Star, and I’m far from finding the answers to do so, but I’ll be damned if I don’t say it has been worth it so far.
Let me sidestep as I’m reminded of my religious journey all of a sudden. As someone who grew up in a Catholic family, I’d used to pray for a whole lot of things, about everything actually. It felt like I had a lot of specifics that I wanted to raise up to a higher being. Now that my journey so far has brought me to a spiritual view more angled towards agnosticism, all that echoes through mind when I accompany the family to a church prayer is this phrase: peace of mind, peace on Earth. Simple, but all encompassing of what I truly wish for and what I believe I’m meant for. And I’ll do all means possible to achieve that. Well, the first half of that phrase at least.
Well, on second thought, maybe I do have something to think of when I blow out my candles this time around. Here’s to 24. 🫡
Happy birthday, Gab! Wishing you all the best life has to offer 🎂🥳