A Widsom Shot by Gwendolen
What and why we celebrate
Do we really understand what celebration is? My sense is that, increasingly, the interiority of celebration is being hollowed out. We have the outer display of celebration, with plenty of fizz and commercialism, but the purpose and meaning behind our acts of celebration has been subtly eroded. Let’s explore this here.
We are familiar, in the West, with celebrating birthdays and significant anniversaries. We celebrate success stories, awards and accolades, academic achievements and we are encouraged, in the world of self-help, to mark the small wins or milestones along the way. We honour high days and holy-days, feasts and festivals across cultures and traditions. Some happen annually and some, like Shabat, happen weekly. Some celebrations have set traditions and rituals; other times we get to improvise and curate unique and meaningful ceremonial experiences.
This explains the what but what about the why? What is actually going on when we celebrate? These are important questions because without this understanding, celebration becomes thin, hollowed out and performative. The result: we are celebrating something yet we’re left feeling oddly flat. Have you ever had such an experience?
Alive Wire Academy Launch and Wisdom Party
In April I hosted the Alive Wire Academy Launch and Wisdom Party.
I was celebrating completion: the completion of a big project, a website now live and the birth of a brand new brand.
Celebration is the marking of something significant; a kind of reflective noting or highlighting. It requires us to stop, slow down, pause, look back in order to move forward. It is what happens when we take the time in the busyness of our ordinary lives to say –
something happened that mattered, and we are going to acknowledge that it matters, together, before we move on.
We honour our lives when we make things matter.
What mattered to me and what I was choosing to celebrate with my community was the process – the journey – what I went through and what it took to get to this point together with the realization that, through this process, I was changed.
The “old me” had many projects on the go at any one time. One foot on the accelerator, the other foot on the brake. Stop-starting. Not-completing. Self-doubting. Time-wasting. It was often frustrating and confusing.
This was until I reached a major choice point in my life.
I choose to do things differently.
I choose to build one bridge at a time.
This became my new mantra.
Focus on one thing and see it through to completion.
In order to build this one bridge, I had to learn skills that were sorely under-developed. I had to meet my distractibility and my resistance. I choose to face the debilitating hesitation, dial down my inner critic and saboteur and get super real about all that had stopped me, stalled me, or slowed me down in the past. And, believe me, it was a lot.
In short, I had to become the person who built the bridge. This took a transformation. A shift in identity. A crossing of a threshold. Ultimately this is what I was celebrating.
The wisdom of celebration
The central theme of the event was the wisdom of celebration. My guests and I explored this theme together. We reflected on the theme of celebration and we acknowledged each other, not with champagne and noise but with something quieter and more substantial. Thought-provoking questions were asked and an inter-generational array of responses were heard. We listened carefully as others named and acknowledged what had been left uncelebrated in their past.
And, as they said out loud, “This happened; this mattered”, something landed.
Let me tell you what I think this was.
When something is acknowledged, and witnessed, and digested, that something becomes real.
Without this, life becomes a blur of activity with no integration.
Without celebration, nothing really lands.
We have experiences but they are not integrated.
We don’t register the shifts that have taken place.
We fail to embed the learning.
We don’t embody the change that we have experienced.
We don’t become the person who did the thing.
We just move on… still ever so slightly disconnected from our own lives.
How true is this for you?
Celebration also acts as an amazing ritual technology of completion that allows us to wrap something up and generate fresh energy for the future. Celebration can be an act of gestalt. We are no longer running with all our metaphorical tabs open. We close the loop.
Lastly, what landed during this beautiful gathering, was the togetherness. We were witnessed in our celebrations. I believe we need each other to celebrate. Why? Because celebration is inherently relational. Celebration has always been embedded in community, in ritual, in a shared story about what matters and why. As we celebrate together we get to make meaning together. And so, celebration brings and bonds a community together. It reinforces belonging. It creates communal coherence and shared memories.
Moreover, as we celebrate with other, especially when we celebrate with dance, music, prayer or even feasting, collective nervous systems are regulated. Individual people re-synchronise with each other. Without this we can drift into fragmentation and isolation.
Why we resist celebration
My sister turns 60 this year. She was not going to “do anything” for her birthday. I live in South Africa and she lives in the UK. So I decided I would fly to the UK and bring the celebration. She is now inviting old and new friends to a party she may not have had. But still she is insisting that she doesn’t want to be the centre of attention.
So here’s the thing…
We need each other to celebrate AND we may well resist celebration because it involves receiving, being visible, being acknowledged or acknowledging something that matters.
We say, “I don’t want to be in the limelight.” Or, “I can’t celebrate when others are suffering.” We fear others may judge us or we will be exposed in some way. And so we minimise our milestones and move on quickly.
Remember the integration piece above? Neuroscience tells us that the act of conscious, deliberate celebration, especially when accompanied by emotion, helps the brain consolidate memory and embed learning. When we skip celebration, we skip integration. We complete things and immediately move on the the next thing. We’re wired to look for the Next Big Thing. The problem is our economy maximises this tendency and sends the strong message that productivity is what matters. Timed paused is time wasted. So we say: “I’ll celebrate when the work is done.” But the finish line keeps moving. The work is never done. It’s no wonder that so many of us feel perpetually behind, dissatisfied, like hamsters on a treadmill that never stops.
A question to consider
I asked this same question at the Alive Wire Academy Launch Party
When was the last time you felt truly witnessed in something that mattered and what did that do for you?
What we have lost
Here is the uncomfortable truth: modern culture has kept the form of celebration while hollowing out its substance and function.
We still have the birthdays, the toasts, the awards ceremonies, the graduations. But somewhere along the way – with all the performance, social medial announcements, consumption and indulgence, celebration has lost some of its animating purpose.
I see three reasons for this.
The first is our productivity culture; the quiet but relentless belief that what matters is what you produce next, not what you have just completed. In a culture that worships output and efficiency, pausing to mark what has been done feels indulgent or too time-consuming. There is always more to do and we keep moving on with pausing to consolidate, celebrate and close.
The second is individualism. The shared communal container that makes celebration meaningful has been eroded. When that container dissolves, celebration becomes a social event rather than a sacred act. The structure remains. The meaning drains away. Social media platforms become the new container. Announcements and emojis hit the spot but true celebration requires witnesses not spectators.
The third is secularism which has largely removed ritual without replacing it. These rituals were structures embedded in society for interrupting ordinary time and inserting moments of heightened attention. The result? We have the shell of ritual without its animating soul. And I suspect many of us feel this.
What we have lost is what anthropologist, Victor Turner, called communitas – the profound sense of shared humanity that emerges in the liminal space of ritual and transition.
Anne Baring, one of the great wisdom keepers of our time, puts it this way:
Celebration, together with traditional rites and rituals, aligns human life with cosmic and natural cycles, keeping people in touch with meaning, community, and the sacred. To reclaim these rituals is not a longing for the past. It is a radical restoration — a healing of fragmentation, a chance to evolve our consciousness so that we can know the sacredness of all life.
Anne Baring
My own threshold moment
I choose to host an event that focused on a central theme: the wisdom of celebration. I choose to celebrate within that container.
For me, it was huge. It was a threshold crossing. The journey to that point was longer and stranger and harder than I will try to explain here. It included a move from Cape Town to Johannesburg and a later move from South Africa back to the UK. My mother’s hidden dementia, the pandemic, the return of her cancer and the extraordinary privilege of doolah-ing her death followed by the quiet almost holy work of clearing and sorting her little bungalow. Liminal space. Uncertainty and not knowing. But still gently trusting. A Saturn Return. A literal return. A homecoming. Back to the Mother City. Two hip replacements. A massive rebrand. More stop-starting. Finally, a decision to face my fears and put my pride aside and ask for help to finish what I’d started.
And then it was done. One bridge at a time. A completed website. A launched academy. A gathering of beautiful souls.
I said it out loud on Sunday, and I mean it now: I crossed a threshold. There was a clear before and after. But something that lived inside me for years was finally created, small step after small step. The bridge was built. It exists. It is real. It was witnessed.
This is what I was celebrating. Not arrival. Not the work is done. It is emphatically not done. No, rather, I was celebrating the journey, the challenges and the support, the beginning and finishing, courage, contact with reality and trust in life.
In the old language of rites of passage, there is a structure: separation, liminality, return. The hero leaves the known world, passes through a period of radical uncertainty and transformation and returns – changed, recognised, received. The celebration at the end is not an add-on. It is the completion of the passage itself. Without it, the return is incomplete.
I was received on Sunday. I came home with the metaphorical boon. The gold. The elixir of life. But it was never mine to keep. Because that’s the point. It is always meant to be shared!
One last thing - celebration in dark times
Here’s another question
Is there something – big or small – that you’ve been withholding celebrating not because you don’t deserve it but because the world’s pain made it feel indulgent or selfish?
It’s understandable that people wonder how they can be popping bubbly when so many people in the world are suffering. I want to say something carefully about this — and I will say it at much greater length in a another piece I’m writing soon, because it deserves more space than I can give it here.
The reluctance to celebrate in dark times is not always avoidance. Sometimes it is genuine moral seriousness. A real solidarity with those who are suffering. A recognition that joy, unchecked, can become a kind of amnesia. But – and this matters – withholding celebration is not the same as solidarity. There is a long tradition, from Viktor Frankl in the concentration camps to the Civil Rights movement, of what might be called defiant joy: the radical act of insisting on meaning and beauty and aliveness precisely because the world is in pain. Not joy instead of grief and suffering but joy alongside it.
Celebration, at its deepest, is not a denial of darkness. It is a refusal to be entirely consumed by it.
What would it mean for you and others if you actually marked something that mattered this year?
When we mark a moment as significant, when we acknowledge this in the presence of others, when we say, out loud…
this happened
this mattered
this was important
this counted for something
it wasn’t easy AND I am changed
as I did the other Sunday – something shifts.
When something is acknowledged, and witnessed, and digested, that something becomes real in a way it wasn’t before. This, I want to suggest, is the heart of celebration.
Alive Wire Wisdom Circle - come and explore with us
Alive Wire Wisdom Circle is a free, online gathering. We meet together on the last Sunday of every month at 6pm (SAST).This is where these conversations continue. Where ideas like these get turned over in community, in real time, with real people.
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