Celebration

There are things in this world worth celebrating, and there are others that get celebrated and leave me wondering ‘why?’. I find New Years to be arbitrary and trivial, while the solstice and the equinox are more genuine. I find christmas to be too commercial and annoyingly religious. Easter only gets the thumbs up because of the whole chocolate thing. Birthdays on the other hand resonate as being deeply important. Then there are things like the Sydney Mardi Gras, which is important but in m case not for personal reasons, instead it is important for social and political reasons. So the whole subject is a mess, and I choose to judge each event by a different set of rules. In the last month I passed the one year anniversary for two related events in my life, neither of these anniversaries were celebrated, for one of these that is just the way it should be, for the other I’m annoyed and wasting missing the chance. Last Friday was the one year anniversary of my going into life-or-death surgery. I’m a lot better now. While the date of the surgery is easy to pin down, I don’t thing there is anything to celebrate is that event, it was the beginning of a long healing process and at some point over the months that followed I changed from being sick to being well. There was no event to mark the change, there was nothing special about the day, its hard to throw a party for a gradual transition. I was very happy to let the day go by with nothing special to mark the occasion, happy to think simply ‘I’m a whole lot better off that I was this time last year’. The end of Mardi Gras marked the other event, and that was my actually getting sick. Okay, so I was fine for Mardi Gras and only got sick in the two weeks that followed, but lets not get too technical. I could think of no better way to complete are recovery that to celebrate the point at which I got seriously ill with a big celebration of life and energy, and Mardi Gras is just that. It is a shame then that I actually attended MUCH less of Mardi Gras this year than the last. I am much better now. Probably better than I ever was before.