DON’T not CELEBRATE
Don’t do that!
The command came out of my mouth before I had a chance to think, arguably not the best approach when parenting a teenager.
Standing across from me at our kitchen island, my seventeen-year-old son had just led out with how his life was going. A smile spread broadly across his face, he beamed and ran-on with linked sentences about how good things were at the moment. School, work, relationships, athletics, all soaring and flowing beautifully.
“I just don’t want to get too excited about it,” he ended, “I don’t want to jinx it.”
Thus my blurted response - Don’t do that!
And when he cocked his head and scrunched his face to ask, ‘Don’t do WHAT?,’ I slowed and found my answer.
Don’t NOT celebrate. Life will throw hard things your way soon enough, don’t skip the good times. Celebrate now. Guarding against the tough things to come won’t protect you from them, it will only rob you of enjoying the highs while they last.
Such good advice.
If only I would listen to it myself.
Not so long after that advice-sharing session in our kitchen, my husband and I experienced a breakthrough in our business. Self-employed and locked in an economy-induced industry slow-down, we had still been making payroll, still been generating income, but things were slow with a capital S. The faucet was on, but it was trickling at an abysmal rate.
And then things changed. The phone rang, the deals came together, the bank accounts headed back towards where they should be.
But did we celebrate?
No.
We caught our breath, we experienced genuine thankfulness, but in some ways we just saw this as preparation for the next slow-down, the next disappointment. Don’t get too excited, best not jinx this.
I’m trying to figure out this balance, this living life between its extremes. Both in my business and in my personal life there are times for celebration and times for mourning. Good times and bad. Times where virtually everything is going ‘right’ and times when it feels as if any sort of positive breakthrough simply cannot be found.
And somehow I’ve decided that the answer to these ups and downs is to forever exist within some elusive happy medium. Not too excited, not too dismayed, never fully celebrating, never fully mourning - as if such behavior would protect me from life’s schizophrenic swings.
This is not as it should be.
I’m working on listening to my own advice. Don’t NOT celebrate.
We caught our double-standard, my husband and I. Standing at an opposite end of the kitchen island, he had heard the heart-felt advice I gave our son that day. In response, we spent months watching how we handled the highs in life and honestly found ourselves a bit lacking. So we are learning.
Learning that being ‘responsible’ doesn’t mean being void of celebration and emotion.
Learning that juggling all the balls of life does not mean that the performer shouldn’t sometimes nestle down for a little rest on the stage.
Learning that constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop doesn’t actually keep those feet moving forward, but only leaves them bare, lacking the protection that a moment of celebration would have provided.
On the two-sided coin that is celebration and mourning, a full life can never really be found in an imaginary line between the two, the coin never truly divided between its two faces. We get to live both - beautifully and fully live both.
So grab those moments to celebrate, brave ones, we all know life gets hard soon enough.