What if I dream and I’m disappointed? What if my hope only leads me to heartache? What if I give it my best effort and I fail? What if I pursue a deep connection and I’m rejected? These are just a few of the "what-if" questions that can plague our minds as we stand on the precipice of a new year or new season.
Part of our apprehension as we stare into the expansive unknown of the future is wondering whether or not we will be given a reason to feel joy or whether or not circumstances will grant us permission to celebrate in the coming year.
We tend to associate celebrations with endings, viewing celebration as a reaction to good news or a reward for an accomplishment. We think we need a reason to celebrate. As a result, we see our joy sitting on the far side of a dream realized, a goal achieved, or some sort of change in circumstances. And often, this supposed finish line is merely a mirage. When we come to this place of arrival, we find that our joy has moved to the other side of another goal or a different dream.
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Sometimes, celebration does look like a reaction to good news or a reward for a job well done. But at its best, celebration is not limited to a reaction or a reward, but practiced as a rhythm that helps us experience more joy in the lives we already have. Celebration is a practice that is available to us right now.
What does this look like? Here are three practices that you can begin incorporating into your life today, regardless of what your life looks like right now or what pain and joy awaits you in the future.
Savoring celebrates the ordinary, expanding our awareness of what is good and deepening our connection to our present joy. It extracts joy from the moments that our brain would be tempted to overlook or discard. Our brains are efficient and will readily dismiss memories it considers insignificant—including those everyday moments of joy—unless we savor them. You don’t need anything other than 30 seconds of your time.
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To begin, choose one moment from your day…it can be the present moment or select a picture of joy you experienced earlier in the day. It might be the look on a friend’s face when you gave them a compliment, a lovely scene in nature, the sound of your child’s laugh as they played in the backyard. Imagine that you are taking a photograph of that moment with your brain.
Next, ask all five of your traditional senses what they are going to remember about this moment. What do you see? What do you smell? What do you hear? What do you taste? What do you feel? In savoring the ordinary moments, you celebrate your life and experience more joy in the life you are already living.
We often talk about gratitude’s impact on joy. And the research is clear that the practice of gratitude does indeed increase our joy as it helps us notice and name what is good, shaping our perspective and putting language to what we feel. But what we don’t often discuss is that the practice of thanksgiving—expressing the gratitude that we feel out loud to other people or to God in our prayers—doubles the joy we would have experienced had we simply felt grateful in our hearts.
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Thanksgiving is the avenue we’ve been given to celebrate the gift with the giver. Joy multiplies when it’s shared. This is true of our prayers too. Through thanksgiving, we can celebrate our gifts with God and double our joy.
Fun is not frivolous, but a homemade gift from God and one of our best defenses against burnout. Often, we consider celebration to be superfluous, and not essential to our lives. Sometimes we are hesitant to celebrate in this way because we fear it’s simply numbing the pain—an unhealthy reaction to life’s hardships.
Celebration helps us process our experience and emotions, while escape presses pause on our emotions. Celebration is not a means of escaping the reality that our hearts are brutally bruised, but rather keeps us grounded in the truth that both our heartache and our hope are true and offers a means of processing both.
Instead of stepping into a new season feeling anxious, wondering if you’ll have a reason to feel joy or worrying about whether or not circumstances will grant you permission to celebrate your life, embrace celebration as a practice you can begin right here, right now.
We are much more empowered over our joy than we tend to believe. Don’t wait to celebrate.
