Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time.

Richter’s image treats time as a vast, living force—an immense wing in motion—while individual birthdays are only small feathers on that wing. The metaphor compresses a human life into a series of slight, almost weightless markers, suggesting both the swiftness of passing years and the modest scale of personal milestones against the sweep of history and mortality. Yet feathers also imply structure: each birthday is a distinct unit that helps “make” the wing, meaning our lives are composed of these recurring points of reflection. The line balances humility (we are small in time) with poignancy (each year is a tangible part of the whole).