Little and Big: Celebration in Community

I gotta tell you, I am struggling with feeling disconnected today. We’ve been stuck home since the first week in March and I miss being with my friends. I miss sharing with them the little and big things we’re up to. Now, we do our zoom calls, and we text and email, and even occasionally see each other for a birthday car parade thing, but I miss the regular updates on how life is going.

This may sound selfish, but I miss having people alongside me who know the details of my life and can help me celebrate the wins, big and small. Maybe it’s not so selfish because I miss doing that for them too. I miss being able to casually mention that I’m struggling with a section of this book and then having someone ask about it a few weeks later, when that struggle has been overcome and forgotten. I miss being able to watch a friend’s toddler move into little kid-ness and celebrating that they aren’t attached 24/7 anymore.

Celebration is one the best ways we have to leverage our connections to make each other’s lives better through community. When we’re connected to people, we know their story – we know what’s easy, and what’s hard, what’s been in the works forever and what’s taking their lives by storm. And then, as informed outsiders, we get the privilege of noticing and calling out the good.

How often do we brush off successes? How often do struggles taper out over time until they’re forgotten? We need people to celebrate us, to help us see how far we’ve come and how our hard work has paid off. Community can give us that. And as members of community, we can give that to others.

This celebration can look as varied as the people we know. But it needs to include noticing a good thing, calling it out in some fashion, and using it to encourage or bolster that person. The good thing can be as conventionally celebrate-able as a wedding or a promotion or as uniquely wonderful as a beautifully laid table that took care and attention. The most important part of celebration is to not let the other person attribute success to luck or put down their efforts. We need to help them see what we already see in them. Their work has value, they have something to offer the world, and we are thankful that they are willing to share their gifts with us.

So, yeah, I miss that. How could I not?

What are you able to celebrate today, for yourself or someone else?