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.