Take time to celebrate

With our 10^th birthday coming up at Company of Women  my focus of late has been on parties and celebrations!

It therefore seemed appropriate to me that we talk about celebrations at our recent breakfast meeting. So as a way to get the meeting off to a positive start,  I had the women each share something they had to celebrate as they introduced themselves.

It was fascinating. 

The celebrations ranged from personal successes like surviving heart surgery, a new grandchild or getting married, to those of a more business nature – like finishing school, finding direction and physically opening a business after four years of persistently trying to make it happen. 

Each success was important in the life of the person and each marked a transition, a life changing moment.

As I sat and listened, it caused me to marvel at our resilience and determination to make life work for us.  For some it is hard work, digging through the dirt and baggage from the past, and yet they do it. In fact, not only do they do it, but they do it well, arising from the ashes as someone with wisdom to share to help others.

I applaud the courage and fortitude it takes to poke around at stuff we would rather keep a lid on, yet intuitively we know that we can’t move forward until the can is open, and the contents dissected.

How often do we reflect on what we have in our lives to celebrate?  Not enough.  This conversation got our meeting off to such a deeper, more meaningful start and we left seeing each other from a different perspective.  In fact, we’ve decided as a group to continue the dialogue.

I remember one year at our conference we had a discussion about celebrations, and the facilitator chuckled as she shared with me that one young woman, a lawyer from Bay Street, looked absolutely puzzled and horrified at the thought of celebrations in the office.  It was a completely foreign concept for her. How sad.

Life can pass us by so quickly and if we don’t take the moment to “count our blessings” to say thank you, to share our successes with one another, we’ve lost that opportunity to be grateful for what we have, who we are or how far we have come.   All too often we focus on the negative, and as they say, like attracts like, so you really don’t want to go there.

Let me ask you, what do you have to celebrate?  Tell someone.  You might be surprised at how that changes the conversation.