Today is Your Birthday!

Today is your birthday! A day for just you. Return to bed, binge on Netflix, or scroll through your phone for an hour or two!

Today is your birthday. “Me, myself, and I!” Shout it from the rooftops, really, don’t be shy!

Today is your birthday. You can eat whatever you want! Bake up some donuts and post pics on Instagram. It’s all about the flaunt.

Today is your birthday. The mantra: “It’s all about me!” Thank goodness for Amazon Prime, the mall, and Anthropologie!

Today is your birthday. Friends better to post on your wall. Better yet, why not share a selfie; humblebrag to remind them all?

Today is your birthday. Gonna treat yo’self all day. So many presents, too many even for Santa’s sleigh!

Today is your birthday. Start celebrating at once! But wait, why do you just get one day? Can’t it be your week, or your month?

Yes, our culture dictates that it’s our birthday all the time. And really, constant birthdays aren’t supreme or sublime.

Having cake every day makes it less special, making cake meaningless, as they say.

Our “Self-Care” / “Treat Yo’Self” generation reinforces privilege and demoralization, throwing self-control out the door.

“Self-Care” should be a time for moderation, contemplation, and gratitude. That’s what it’s for!

So if every day is “Birthday!”, we should take more time to care. For ourselves and our loved ones. Be moderate and self-aware.

And if today is really your birthday, you can of course have cake, and be sure to share!

But if every day is a birthday, why not turn inward, and take a look at what’s really there?

The Meaning of the Season

The holidays force us to make time to be grateful, to connect with family, and to engage in conversation around a plentiful table. We cook together, clean together, travel together in close proximity; we sleep on the floor so that the older ones can take the beds. We make room for the cat, for the dog, and we snuggle on couches with hot tea while watching the parade on TV. There is stillness and simplicity in breathing the same air as our mothers and fathers and grandparents. There is a calm that accompanies the repetition of time-tested tradition. There is a warmth that memories of the past bring to our hearts, and there is a sweetness in the expectation of happy holidays to come. Varying in type and degree across all kinds of families, our special holiday rituals give us that deliciously satisfying sense of closeness, presence, and warmth that pave the way to the New Year.

Sometimes all the truth and beauty of the holidays can be overlooked by everything leading up to it. Let's start with the first holiday of the season, Thanksgiving. In recent years - or perhaps it's been happening for ages - I've noticed that Thanksgiving has lost some of its closeness, presence, and warmth. Thanksgiving has gradually become a time for Christmas decorations and shopping. Most, if not all, major department stores offer Black Friday deals. For smaller businesses, there's something called Small Business Saturday, and then every retailer has their own version of Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, and so many more. Shops even open on Thanksgiving Day for Black Friday specials. Coupled into the biggest shopping weekend of the year, the sanctity of this historic day has been broken. 

If you peek back into history, you will discover that the date of the holiday was moved by Roosevelt to extend the Christmas shopping season by one week. How can we find meaning and importance in the beginning of the holiday season if Thanksgiving weekend is actually an economic requirement? 

Thanksgiving has lost its way in the American calendar. It has been stomped over and downtrodden by lines of intense, confrontational shoppers waiting to get their early-bird wristbands and buy the latest gadget or clothing item. Impatient and intolerant, we lash out at others if our expectations aren't met. Please google "racist rant at Chicago Michael's" to see what I mean.

Perhaps this Season of Thankfulness is only a cover-up for our economic dependence on compulsive materialism. We want to be "thankful," but here we are, circling laps through the self-indulgent lands of capitalism, running an inner marathon. We are too busy cultivating our outward thankfulness to realize what we are actually doing. In snapping selfies during the holiday season, our narcissism spills over in edited images of ourselves: Here's me being thankful! or, Here's me with the 24lb turkey I cooked! and again,  Here's me with my family! And of course, we must include all the appropriate ornamental hashtags: #soblessed #thankful2016 #passthegravy #thankfulday #countyourblessings #turkeycoma...

When families get together to share in their lives, wonderful results can occur. Generations collide and meaning is made. New truths are told and memories are wrapped up in hugs, laughter, and pensive moments before the dawn of a new year. Magical moments come alive, and we suspend our disbelief without asking How? or Why? And, when that magic returns to us, we smile at the echo of our parents' voices from many decades ago: If you are quiet, and listen closely, you just might hear the bells on Santa's sleigh...

Wonderful results can only occur if we intentionally shed at least some of the superficiality of the holiday. We really should be tapping into the true meaning of the season. In order to authentically feel the simplicity, warmth, and presence of the holiday, we should ask ourselves:

1. Why are we celebrating? 

2. What about this day (or moment) brings us joy?

3. How can we grow, even just a little bit, from an interaction with a cousin/aunt/brother?

4. Why are we going through such great lengths to produce a perfectly seasoned, succulent turkey?

5. Moreover, how can we extend our harvest of thankfulness year-round, and to others in this world? 

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and give thanks continuously...Because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson
 

Make Gratitude a Practice Instead of a Hashtag

#begrateful #sothankful #gratitude

These concepts are always trending. We always seem to advertise our gratitude for friends, family, colleagues, resources, and our health. And, we desperately want our gratitude to be validated by having others “like” our posts about what we are grateful for. However, gratefulness and gratitude aren’t things that can be accomplished by hash-tagging on social media.

Gratitude is not a trend, which by definition, implies it will only be around for a short time.

Gratitude is a practice. This means we must donate time and effort to gratitude, and employ self-discipline to create a habit out of showing others we are thankful.

When we make gratitude into a personal tradition, our perceptions shift naturally to allow more gratitude into our lives. We are more able to acknowledge that when people are nice to us, they are doing it on purpose, so that we can benefit from their “time, treasure, or talent." Recognizing when others are grateful helps us to feel good; moreover, it inspires us to do good things for others.

Gratitude helps us “see ourselves as part of a larger, intricate network of sustaining relationships that are mutually reciprocal." It is in this cyclical rhythm of thankfulness that we are able to really to feed the trend toward gratitude, so that this virtue continues to nourish our lives.

When we make gratitude a practice instead of a hashtag, we will able to flourish and thrive.

Web of Belongingness

There was once an animal behaviorist who devised a theory about human needs. Through the study of monkeys, Abraham Maslow concluded that, in order to reach our full potentials, we have to belong. This basic need, above needs such as food, water, shelter, and safety, takes root in our need to feel important, and to see our importance reflected in the mind's of others. We have an innate desire to be socially acknowledged, and we maintain our social selves by chronicling our accomplishments on resumes and portfolios, and on social and professional networks.

We belong to families, to high school friend circles, to college societies, and to employment related groups. We assert our social selves in digital arenas, email chains, and text messages. We say "yes" to each wedding invitation, each Sunday brunch, each "friend" request, and follower. Our web of belongingness reaches further and further with each successive interaction, and our social needs, stretched thin, become more transparent and more difficult to define and satisfy. We are left questioning ourselves - How do we know when we are done belonging? When can we simply belong?

Satisfying social needs has become more complex since the 1940s when Maslow published his first book on human motivation. Currently, and very obviously, we not only have to satisfy these needs in our real world, but we must also satisfy them in a virtual world as well. The decisions we make regarding the need to belong have become limitless with all the available methods of communication. Often we worry that we may miss out on a social event of some kind, or a friend connection on Facebook, and we continually expand our reach. With every "yes" or click, there resides a hope that, finally, our belonging needs will be fulfilled.

Unfortunately, endless physical and virtual opportunities to connect muddle the definition of social "needs," and transform these needs into social "wants." Our progress is limited not only by the confusion between what we need socially, and what we want socially, but also by the simple fact that we often don't take the time to be grateful for the belongingness we already feel. Showing gratitude can help us to appreciate what we have, and help us to avoid superficial social actions and connections that accumulate into "wants." Maslow argued that if we demonstrate small acts of gratitude, and are thankful for what relationships we have, we will know more about what we truly need socially. We will thrive in our ability to "enjoy life in general and practically all its aspects, while most other people enjoy only stray moments of triumph."