The more you celebrate your life, the more in life there is to celebrate.
— Oprah Winfrey
Over the past few years, I’ve heard from far too many of those that I care about that they have gotten further and further away from enjoying the tiny moments of celebration and joy in their lives. I tend to agree. The pandemic seemed to make the world a much more serious place.
A tough thing for me has been the separation. There’s been such a separation between me, and so many of the people that I love – family and friends – that when I do get to see them, it’s genuinely a treat. Admittedly, I don’t leave the house as much as I once did, I work a lot, vacations are a rarity, and my social circle is small.
Celebrating the small moments in my life is something I, for one, want to get back to. It’s 2023, and it is three years since the pandemic originally began. Three whole years!! There are dear people in my life that I have hardly seen over the past three years. There are friends of mine that had babies early in the pandemic that are now toddlers, and I have hardly seen them as they have grown into little beings. I’m ready. I’m ready to begin celebrating life!
This weekend I celebrated another trip around the sun. I have such a sense of gratitude and I was blessed to begin my weekend going out to dinner with my two beautiful daughters and to end my weekend having dinner with my sister and her family and my dad. I would like to bookmark these celebrations and get togethers in my memory forever.
But there is great fun in celebrating the small things in life as well!
If you are already the celebrating type then I’m giving you a hi5 already! And… I would love to hear about it any of the ways that you take part in small daily celebrations. Here are a few are my favorites that you might like:
Take the time to write a note thanks someone in your life who has made a great impact on you. Celebrate the impact that they have already had and continue to have on your life.
Take some time with family to sit and go through family albums, sharing stories about the people in them. The best part of this is that you will all have different stories and different experiences to bring to the table.
Take a picture each day of some thing that inspires you or lights up your heart and maybe even journal about it so that you’ll have some thing to reflect on later. There are some apps for this (ie. day one, project 365)
Start a memory jar. My girls and I were diligent about this for many years, but have fallen off for the past two. (I just started back up) We have a mason jar that we contribute to daily with slips of paper that write down what we are grateful for that day, the best part of our day, or our small accomplishments for that day. At the end of the year on New Year’s Eve, we unravel all of these slips of paper, and review all of our accomplishments and memories.
Get out your calendars in your family and create silly holidays. Yep, ones that don’t exist. This way you do not have to wait for the bigger holidays to get together to celebrate.
Put on music and dance for absolutely no reason!
We create meaning in our lives by celebrating and acknowledging things that are important to us. When life gets busy, and we neglect to celebrate and acknowledge our happy and meaningful moments, it’s reflected in health people often feel about their own lives. Give yourself the gift of pausing, reflecting, celebrating, and dancing!
There are shortcuts to happiness and dancing is one of them.
— Vicki Baum