When Namgay and I married 26 years ago, we had a plan to visit the United States. And so he needed a passport. I sat with him to help fill out the necessary documentation. We were doing fine until we got to his date of birth, which was actually the next question after his name.

Namgay didn’t know when his birthday was.

The man I married did not know the date of his own birth. Namgay said it had been written down somewhere on a piece of paper, documented by an astrologer when he was born, detailing all the significant events of his life and, presumably, when he would die. 

Could he get the paper? 

He didn’t remember where it was.

This is not unusual in Bhutan. Many people here have no idea when they were born. They weren’t born in hospitals where dates were recorded, which is why so many Bhutanese celebrate their birthdays on 1 January, the start of the solar calendar. There are actually five major new year celebrations in Bhutan, tied to the agricultural calendar and the solstice presumably, or the dates could quite possibly be random. They occur from December through February and all, except the Gregorian 1 January, are moveable feasts—religious holidays that fall on a different date each year rather than a fixed calendar date, like Easter, which moves around based on the lunar calendar, and always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

Ernest Hemingway gave the phrase a second life, titling his memoir about Paris in the 1920s A Moveable Feast. In reference to Paris, he meant that you could carry the idea of it wherever you went in life.

Well, that was a genuine digression. 

I suggested that we just give Namgay a new birthday. Passports require birthdays, and we needed to push on with the application. The day happened to be 17 February, so I wrote that down. And for the next 26 years, 17 February was Namgay’s birthday. It’s in his passport, on his ID card, and on every other document he owns. We celebrate it.

A few weeks ago, on the morning of 17 February, I woke him with a cheerful “Happy Birthday!” He smiled. We had coffee. It was the start of a perfectly nice birthday.

Then he went to a little metal box he keeps in a cupboard and rummaged around. He pulled out a folded piece of paper. It was Bhutanese paper made with Daphne bark, old, soft, covered in the elegant hieroglyphs of Choki script. It was the astrologer’s notations—the one written when Namgay was born; the one he hadn’t been able to find 26 years ago. Or any year since then.

He looked at it for a moment and then held it out in front of him so I could see. 

Namgay’s birthday, it turned out, is 27 April. Not 17 February. We have been celebrating the wrong birthday for 26 years, although Namgay is only mildly interested in this fact. I have so many questions, the foremost of which is why did he wait so long? Why this year? Why now?

That’s when I started thinking about Bergson.

The French philosopher, Henri Bergson, writing at the turn of the 20th century, proposed his big idea—the one that won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927—about time. Specifically, he thought that we moderns had gotten the notion of time badly wrong.

In his book Time and Free Will, Bergson drew a distinction between two kinds of time. There is clock time: the time of calendars and passports and birthdays, which he saw as a spatial metaphor, time laid out like a ruler, divided into equal measurable units. And then there is what he called durée, or duration: time as we actually live it, from the inside. 

Duration is not strictly measurable. It is qualitative, not quantitative. It flows in “shades of being.” It is continuous, fluid, accumulative; it’s less like a ruler and more like a piece of music, where each note carries the memory of all the notes before it and anticipates all the notes to come. You cannot step outside of duration to measure it without destroying the very thing you’re trying to measure. A birthday, in clock time, is a fixed point. In duration, it is a drop of water in an ongoing river.

Bergson’s argument was that Western thought had become so enchanted with clock time, with the idea of quantity, measurement, and the idea that time is something that can be divided and pinned down, that we had lost touch with time as it is actually experienced. We had confused the map for the territory.

Buddhist philosophy has been making a version of this argument for more than 2,500 years.

The Buddhist concept of anitya, impermanence, holds that nothing is fixed, nothing holds still, everything arises and passes in a continuous flow of becoming. What we call the self is not a stable object moving through time but a process unfolding in time, moment by moment. The self that was born on some day in April or February (we’re still working this out), is not the same self drinking coffee this morning. Both exist in the stream and the stream is always moving.

Tibetan Buddhist ideas of time go further. Time is cyclical, not linear. It spirals. It folds back on itself. The Bhutanese calendar, with its nine months as well as our five regional new years, and its astrologers’ mapping the shape of a life at the moment of birth, are not failed attempts to conform to the Gregorian calendar. It is a different relationship with time altogether, and one that is far more interested in the quality and character of a moment than in its coordinates.

An astrologer’s paper and a passport form are not so different—both are attempts to pin a life down on paper. One is just more beautiful with higher stakes.

For his part, Namgay is not particularly troubled by any of this. He is Buddhist, and Bhutanese, and an artist, and so he has always had a very easy relationship with time. He does not experience his birthday as a fixed point that must be correctly identified and annually commemorated. He experiences it, I think, the way Bergson would have wanted all of us to experience time: as something that flows through and around us, not something we stand on. 

The astrologer’s paper is back inside the metal box. We might celebrate Namgay’s birthday in April, or whenever we get around to converting the Bhutanese calendar date to the Gregorian one, or we might just leave it in February. Our daughter Kinlay has weighed in, calling foul. She says we have to keep 17 February because he can’t double dip.

Old habits fix our ideas in time. It’s worth pausing, for at least as long as it takes to read this, to dwell on quality rather than quantity. Twenty-six years is a long time. The wrong birthday has its own duration now. It has accumulated. It has become, in its own way, real and, dare I say, a moveable feast.

Related features from BDG

Remember Mr. White
A New Chapter for Buddhist Nuns
Buddha in a Teacup: Notes from a Non-Capitalist Life in Bhutan

More from Buddha in a Teacup by Linda Leaming