Just about every ambitious person I know has struggled at some point with celebrating their successes. It doesn’t seem to come easily to many of us, and the most common excuse I hear is that by the time we reach the milestone we’ve been striving toward, we have already mentally moved on to the next one, our minds so fixated on the future we neglect the present.
Sure, there’s one friend I can think of who describes herself as a sybarite (that’s the actual word she used; isn’t it delicious?) but the more common experience seems to be that celebration gets glossed over in favour of a sigh of relief – Phew, that’s done! – and an immediate plunge into the next challenge.
Perhaps, as Evelyn Resh suggests, we need to start by learning to enjoy and savour small pleasures, as a kind of practice of the skill of celebration. She gives the example of the woman who loves coffee, yet chugs her first cup of the day in the car while driving. The author suggests that instead, she take 10 minutes to do nothing else but savour her morning coffee, and fully experience the pleasure it brings. I’ve been testing this theory out with encouraging results.
Here’s your weekly curiosity experiment:
- What are you working on right now that deserves to be celebrated?
- What simple pleasures do you sometimes overlook in your day?
- What helps you celebrate yourself?