Celebration.
At some point in recent decades, we lost the art of celebration. Perhaps this is our chance to rediscover it, writes
Around a year ago, I realised I was terrible at celebrating stuff. This took me by surprise, because I spent a lot of time in fancy restaurants, crowded parties, theatres and hotels. I could have argued that it’s my job to know the best ways to celebrate, not just in my town, but in destinations all over the globe. As a travel writer, surely I am a celebration hunter?
Nope. A nice experience is not the same thing as a celebration. A celebration requires us to be fully in the moment, basking in glory,
contentment, relief or even sorrow, whatever the celebration requires. We need to taste the present moment, feel the present moment, hear the present moment. Celebrating is about wallowing in the now, like a warm Jacuzzi.
Celebrating is not an easy thing to do if you’re a 21st-century human. My life was not short of lavish experiences and pleasant sensations, but even though I tried to call them celebrations, and Instagrammed them as such, I just wasn’t moving slowly enough to truly celebrate.
The most obvious type of not-quitecelebrations are those that wind up feeling like another notch on our endless to-do list. Last year, I had four boozy Christmas parties in a row. By the end of the week I was viewing these social obligations much like a dentist’s appointment; moments to plough through but certainly not savour.
There are not-quite-celebrations that are joyless because of our own anxieties, like the birthday dinner I hosted a couple of years ago, which I spent stewing in my own worries about it being a failure. All my pleasure in the evening was retrospective, which immediately disqualifies an event from being a celebration. If you think my birthday sounds bad, I have friends who cheerfully admit they hated their own wedding days.
And there are not-quite-celebrations when we almost always miss the moment, like when we buy a house or get a promotion. Big life milestones that should be marked, we’re told, with a Champagne cork popping and a roomful of gleeful familiar faces. But in truth, I’ve never really celebrated a professional achievement the way they do in Sex and the City, Friends or another reliable documentary about modern life. By the time a new job contract finally arrives, ending weeks or months of uncertainty, I’m busy panicking about my first week in the new role, or beating myself up for not asking for a bigger raise.
I’ve been marginally better at celebrating other people’s birthdays, new jobs, new homes and other minor triumphs, but even then, it’s rare that a “celebration” doesn’t fall short; often because it fails to lift us out of our routine. A celebratory bottle of wine isn’t really a celebration if we had one the night before. And a birthday dinner at a restaurant we go to every month just won’t stand out in our memory banks.
At some point in the latter decades of the 20th century, we lost the art of celebration. We became too accustomed to everyday abundance to notice the mild uptick in our indulgence levels at a supposed celebration. We became too busy and frantic to engage emotionally with what it is we’re meant to be celebrating. Social media played its part, too; it became more important to document ourselves enjoying an event than to actually enjoy the event; it’s often hard to do both. Throw in the guilt drummed up by the wellness industry – guilt about that glass of Champagne or chocolate truffle – and celebrating was pushed beyond our reach on most occasions.
But today, this has changed. The past few months have been something of a celebration detox, with lockdown resembling a strict rehab facility where I was treated for celebration abuse and abundance fatigue. Now, I’m being released back into the world with a new, healthier relationship with celebration.
Celebrations aren’t an indulgence; they serve a purpose. Small moments of celebration make us pause and be mindful, and when we stop to savour the good stuff of life, we protect ourselves against the bad, buffering our souls, and building resilience. Celebrations give us something to look forward to. And in 2020, we could all do with a bit of that.
The past few months have been something of a celebration detox, with lockdown resembling a strict rehab facility where I was treated for celebration abuse.