How Can Today Be Made into a Notable Special Occasion?
You can choose to treat today as the special occasion you desire for it to be.
Our culture has a major love affair with celebrating special occasions.
These include birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, graduations, and many massive achievements like promotions, marriages, births, and so on.
The focus, however, often gets rather narrow when it comes to defining a special occasion versus the everyday. People put so much energy, time, attention, and investment into a given special occasion that they ignore all else.
In other words – today, and most days, are treated as unimportant. Then, they got lost in the shuffle of the rote, routine, and day-to-day approach of our culture.
Even the weekend – two days out of every seven – is treated as a more special occasion. The other five days? Humdrum, passed through, and not in any way special.
Is life supposed to be ho-hum and not terribly worthwhile more often than it’s special? No. Human beings are not simply here to exist and survive – but to thrive.
Thus – why can’t every day be – or at least have within it – a special occasion?
Let go of the lies
Most of us believe a lot of lies about the way life, the universe, and everything works. They include,
- There is not enough good to go around
- To get what you desire you must meet certain indeterminate standards
- Only a few people are worthy and deserving
- Lack, scarcity, and insufficiency dominate the world
- Life’s a bitch and then you die
- If you aren’t “X” you are unworthy of “Y”
- You control nothing
- “They” control our lives
- Suffering is more abundant than joy or contentment
- We must do this, that, or the other thing to prove our worth
These are just a few examples of the many lies we swallow regularly. But they are not the truth in any way, shape, or form.
What is the truth?
- There is more than enough good to go around
- So long as it hurts or harms nobody else, you can get what you desire
- Everyone is worthy and deserving
- We live in an abundant Universe
- Life is what you consciously create it to be
- No matter if you are “X” you are worthy of “Y”
- You control your life experience
- “They” don’t control us unless we cede control to them
- Joy and contentment can be found anywhere you look for it
- We are all worthy – and there’s nothing we need to do to prove our worth
Every single lie and artifice we buy into can be countered.
Sometimes that seems extremely hard to believe. Turn on the news, scroll through social media, and you’ll be bombarded by stories and information to confirm that we live in a world going to shit.
Is it any wonder we think special occasions are so occasional?
Make the special occasion less occasional
When we save up our energy for special occasions, the rest of our time – frankly, the majority of our time – gets deemphasized. It gets treated as less important and less worthy and deserving.
Not only do we desire to be treated as worthy and deserving – how life is treated falls into this, too.
Life itself is worthy and deserving. That might seem trite and kind or hacked, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
Consider the words of artist Mary Engelbreit,
“Don’t ever save anything for a special occasion. Being alive is the special occasion.”
Please take that into consideration. “BEING ALIVE IS THE SPECIAL OCCASION.”
When you look at the science of life – we are a wonder. Despite what some think, human beings are animals. What makes us different from the other animals on this planet is our ability to think abstractly, reason, and create tools that allow us to live anywhere on the globe we choose.
Other animals in nature live in specific climates. Humans don’t. We choose to build climate-controlled spaces and live wherever we damned well please. No other animal on Earth can do that so willingly (or in some instances willfully).
Being alive – and a human being with all the potential and possibility we have – is a special occasion.
It doesn’t always feel so special
Life is never perfect for anyone all the time. Everyone has pain, experiences loss and suffering, and has bad days.
We are all going to have times when we are miserable. And it sucks. But that doesn’t mean we are somehow more deserving of suffering and failure than contentment and success.
There will be periods in every life that feel awful. No joy, no contentment, just anger, sadness, depression, and what-have-you. While everyone experiences the what and how of their emotions and thinks differently – everyone experiences the bad just as much as the good.
However, we get to choose – when we reach a bad place – how long we’ll remain there.
I have not been in a good headspace for a week. Various and sundry circumstances and situations have been the cause of this. My work has suffered, I’ve been less attentive to certain things, and moping. I have chosen to use time wasters and stay in this bad place over taking action to move on.
Writing these words and considering how every day and just being alive can be a special occasion has helped me choose differently. I sat down to focus on these words, wrote this, and feel contentment. And I hope that the idea that life itself is a special occasion can help you find the same contentment.
How can today be made into a notable special occasion? By choosing to find a special occasion today – and every day.
Turning today into a special occasion isn’t hard
It begins with mindfulness of our thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions.
Knowing that every day we have a choice for how we do anything and everything we do, we can work to make any day a notable special occasion. When we choose to be less stingy with special occasions and make them more common than rare, we give ourselves more outlets for contentment and joy. That ultimately empowers us all.
When you are empowered, your mindfulness increases, you become more aware overall, and that gets reflected and spreads to other people. This creates a feedback loop of awareness and positivity – a feedback loop everyone can take part in.
Then, together, we build more positive feelings and discover further reasons to feel positivity and gratitude. That becomes the impetus to improve our lives for the better, help overcome the overwhelming negativity of any current situation, and generate even more positivity and gratitude.
An attitude of gratitude is an attitude of pure positivity. That positivity can generate even greater positive energies – and that is ultimately empowering for all.
Everyone is worthy and deserving of all the good we desire.
This is the four hundred and sixth entry of my Positivity series. It is my hope these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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PS – Thank you to Mary Engelbreit for the inspiration.
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