Project Vision 21

Human beings celebrate births, birthdays, and weddings, as well as graduations, promotions, and even championships. Countries also celebrate their independence days and their heroes. Some celebrations are repeated once a year, and others never occur. But what are we celebrating when we celebrate what we celebrate?

We celebrate the arrival of a new baby, someone's birthday, or a couple starting their life together. Others celebrate a new house, a long-sought university degree, the opening of their own business, or their team winning a championship. All of that is true, but we still don't know what it means to celebrate.

Every celebration is selective. We celebrate what we consider so important that we want to share it with others. And we consider it important because it's something we would like to remember, repeat, and pass on.

Celebrating a birthday doesn't reflect the entirety of a person's life. Celebrating a wedding anniversary doesn't reveal the couple's entire life. Celebrating our favorite team's championship doesn't include reflecting on all the struggles, injuries, and defeats of the tournament.

In short, the celebration is not meant to tell the truth, but to preserve meaning. The totality of truth, however it is understood, is fragmented so that something important is preserved: we remember and repeat that fleeting and ephemeral moment, wishing it were something permanent, even eternal.

From this perspective, celebration is a double illusion: the illusion of grasping a fragment of reality as if (at least for a short time) that were the whole of reality, and the illusion of believing that the ephemeral can be permanent. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it's an illusion that helps us continue living with everything we don't celebrate.

When you watch a movie, you know it's just a movie, but you still get excited. The movie ends, and you have to go back to "real" life. When you celebrate something, you know that's not all of reality, but you celebrate anyway, and when the celebration ends, you go back to real life, but with the stability needed to face it.

In other words, celebrating is neither about reveling in illusion nor about finding solace in the illusion that the celebration will continue. In fact, we celebrate what we celebrate precisely to transcend the illusion of a life without difficulties by reaffirming, individually and collectively, what we consider important in our lives, what we want to remember.

Celebration is therefore not escape from reality. It is a temporary, conscious bracketing of reality that allows us to return to life with gratitude, orientation, responsibility, and hope. The deepest thing we celebrate is that what passes can still matter.

What happens when the celebration ends and we have to return to daily life? It is there, in that moment of disruption, that the truth appears (however you understand it) because it is at that moment that we need to reorient our lives. When the candles are extinguished and the fireworks end, that is when the new future unexpectedly begins.