We don’t earn it; we align with it!

Hello to you, my beautiful Kind Over Matter friend.

I want to talk to you about celebration and the place it has in your life.

Is celebration like that beautiful silk shawl you only allow yourself to wear once a year when you go to the theater? Is celebration the flowers someone buys you on your birthday? Is celebration the trophy, the medal or the certificate?

Or, is celebration the sweet sound of the house finch with the red belly in the acacia tree in your backyard — the song you hear every morning? Is it the joy you experience when you see there is a text from your mom or best friend? Is it the way it feels when you wear the sweater Ginny knitted for you?

Is celebration something you get to have once in a while? Or, is it a feeling you allow yourself throughout the day, every day?

My deepest hope for all of us is that if celebration isn’t yet a part of our everyday life, that we might make it a practice to notice and create it way more than we currently do.

All of our lives, we’ve been fed lies about celebration. We’ve been told that we wait for it, we earn it, we deserve it if we’ve done something good. We’ve been told there are special days to celebrate or that it comes after a lot of hard work and effort.

But here’s the truth:

• You do not have to wait for special occasions in order to celebrate.
• Celebration can be a part of your everyday life.
• You do not have to earn celebration.  (You do not have to accomplish anything or win anything or do anything in order to celebrate.)
• You do not have to be happy to celebrate. (In fact, it is your birthright to celebrate the whole range of emotions; to celebrate being human.)
• You do not have to have a cake or champagne or flowers or confetti to celebrate. (Yeah, confetti is great. Balloons are fun. Champagne and bubbles of all kinds are festive. But you do not have to be or feel festive in order to celebrate.)
• YOU and YOUR LIFE and all the LIFE around you are the celebration. It’s all here waiting for you.

When we allow celebration only to be a reward for something, whether it’s a milestone event or something we accomplish, then we’re missing all of the countless moments of a celebration that happen simply because we’re alive and this is our one fleeting life.

What we need to do is to help ourselves find tiny moments to celebrate, no matter what.

Need some help? Okay! No problem. That’s my job.

How’s this for ways to Celebrate Now?

• Authentic celebration can be as simple as whispering to ourselves, “What do you need, honey?”
• It can be turning our face toward the sun, even when everything in us feels clouded over with sadness or fear.
• It can be calling a friend, like I did earlier this week, to say “I am feeling sad and crabby all at once. Can you help?”
• Celebration can be the connection we feel to someone else when we ask for help and they stand by our side and suddenly things just feel a little more okay.
• Celebration is when you stand in the yard very quietly because right there, under that bush, you see a baby bunny.
• Celebration is when you are walking in the rain with your black and white polka dotted umbrella and you pass a neighbor and she is holding her black and white striped umbrella and she beams at you, like sunshine.
• Celebration can be holding your mom’s hand at her sister’s funeral, tears streaming down both of your faces and love circling all around the grief.
• Celebration can be that moment you sit up in bed and place your feet on the floor and you understand that one day you will not wake up, but today you did. Today your feet are on ground and you are breathing and that is everything.

It’s possible to live a life of celebration — no matter what is going on. No matter the ups and downs. No matter the sorrows and losses. I’m not talking about a Pollyanna ignoring of feelings; I’m talking about bringing all of it into the circle of celebration.

Here’s your challenge today after you finish reading this: Can you find celebration in your own life in times when you are not happy, you didn’t win, or it isn’t a special occasion? Can you find celebration no matter what or just because or in spite of?

I hope so! And when you do, come back and share in the comments about it, okay?!