Reflections on Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday
My birthday is January 14 and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s is January 15. I always felt a special connection to Dr. King because his birthday is the day after mine. You see, in New York in the 70’s, MLK Day was a New York State holiday and so if Jan. 15 fell on a school day, I’d get the day after my birthday off, which was pretty awesome. Also, January is a pretty crappy month to have a birthday if you get right down to it (and us January birthdays have a special comradery), so I definitely felt like I shared something special with Dr. King.
While I was doing research for this essay, I read the Wikipedia page about Dr. King and it included an interesting anecdote. He had a brother and sister and one time, his brother knocked his sister down and MLK thought she was dead and he was so distraught that he threw himself out an upstairs window. It made me think about him not as this towering figure but as a kid. A kid who felt things very deeply and passionately. And this made me think about how the seeds of all that Dr. King became were already in him then.
During this last year of being intensively coached, I started to pay more attention to the themes of my own life story, the strands that are woven through it. Those strands are me - I am what every day and year of my life has in common. I was the same person as a baby, a child, a teenager and now as a 57 year old. And so is every one else. That child that we started out as is still in there If we stop and think about what we loved to do as children, we can sometimes find our way back to ourselves, to our special source of joy.
It’s hard to believe that Dr. King was only 38 when he died. I am almost 20 years older that that. Yet since I learned about him as a child, he will always be older than me. Thinking about Dr, King makes me think about my childhood, it feels like a kind of time travel. Thinking back to learning about him in elementary school makes me remember the self that I was as a child. And because I am thinking about something that happened when I was a child, it brings back the whole world of my childhood and reminds me, when I return to the present, how much has changed since then, how much has not.
Dr. King was such an extraordinary person, so wise and passionate, such a great speaker, such a warrior for peace. I’m realizing now that because Dr. King’s birthday was so meaningful for me, that maybe I paid a little extra attention to the lessons about him. I consider Dr. King to be one of my teachers. I have learned from him through formal lessons in school to my own discoveries, for my entire life. And here I am, still learning from his life story.