EDITORIAL FEATURE
Recognizing the Value
of Celebration - Part 3
By Kim Sawyer
I
n the first two parts of Recognizing the
Value of Celebration, we explored the
meaning of value as the basic guide
to and result of successful living and
then we tied this to our sense of life. We
also explored how without a conscious
and usually challenging effort, our sense
of self and sense of the world skew to the
dark side. So how do we counter this?
In this context, “celebration” can be
seen as deliberate conscious efforts to
break the hold that negative things have
on our awareness and viewpoint and refocus our attention on good things. One
manifestation of that survival mechanism of ours is that it instantly forces our
attention into a sort of tunnel vision on
the threat. This is a good thing for a survival response but as I explained in part
2, wreaks havoc on our attitude and outlook.
The immediate antidote to that tunnel
vision is to force ourselves into a process
of celebration. This literally and almost
mechanically cracks the lens that constrains our view and expands our awareness back to the entirety of ourselves,
our lives, and our world as a whole. We
suddenly realize that our problems are
only a very small part of the whole picture. With our survival mode tunnel vision, the problem is all we see; it becomes
our whole world and our world becomes
no more than the problem. The celebration process may seem forced and fake,
as we probably don’t feel the emotional
response to it especially when we need
it the most. But it serves its purpose and
soon the emotions respond to the reclamation of our formerly hijacked consciousness. The paradox in celebration
is that the more we need it, the harder
it is to do. However it’s the only method
I have discovered to master our sense of
life and thus our state of readiness to live
well.
Now to take a further look at the phenomenon of celebration, we see that
there are basically two forms, each one
corresponds to one of the two aspects of
sense of life – our sense of ourselves and
our sense of the world. The form of celebration that addresses our world view is
celebrating gratitude and the form that
relates to self view is celebrating wins.
Celebrating gratitude as a form of ritual is the thought process, activity, and
conversation whose purpose is to acknowledge, grasp, appreciate, and experience the impact and meaning of the
people and valuable things that exist in
our world which we have not directly
made to be there. Gratitude is an effort
– a deliberate process. Because a feeling
may follow from the act, most of us mistake the feeling for gratitude and overlook the action altogether. Of course,
this totally disempowers us and leaves
us at the mercy of our sense of life and
our feelings, neither of which can we directly control. This attention to all these
countless gifts in our lives counters the
instinctual obsession we have with that
relatively small set of unfavorable situations that we have not created.
The Technology of Celebration:
Celebrating wins, as a form of ritual, is
the thought process, activity, and conversation whose purpose is to acknowledge,
grasp, appreciate, and experience the impact and meaning of the valuable things
we do. Celebrating wins is an effort B