By Klaus Döring
If there’s one surefire way to increase your joy in life, it’s this: celebrate the good things that happen to you. Life hands us a lot of lumps, and it’s easy sometimes to lose the joy amidst the juggle of work, family, and community responsibilities. During stressful times, celebration can feel frivolous or indulgent, but there are good reasons not to skip out on marking life’s special moments.
From a scientific perspective, sharing our joy with others (or capitalization, as psychologists call it), helps intensify our joy in the moment, while also increasing our long-term happiness and life satisfaction. As Charlotte Brontë once wrote in a letter, “Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.”
Many of the ways that we celebrate can also have positive side effects. Celebratory gatherings serve as a form of release that dissolves tension and promotes more egalitarian behavior. Celebrations involving music or dance can also promote synchrony, a phenomenon wherein moving or singing together causes people to be more altruistic, generous, and community-minded. They can also deepen relationships between individuals. Celebrations can create a sense of shared identity and common purpose. They can highlight values you care about, such as kindness or playfulness, making others aspire to these ideals.
From time to time I love silence. I love quietness. Special moments in my life. Do you observe that we live in a real frightful loud world? At every corner of our daily life are innumerable chances of being covered up with sometimes unbearable din and noise. The loud outcry gives me the needle. We don’t have nerves of steel forever.
I am not really a fan of going out at night. If you ask me how to spend a lovely evening after a hectic and stressful and, especially, noisy day – plain and simple.
The nicest occurrence is the silence, the intimate taciturnity, which can even “weld” people or partners together. It might sound just like an idiomatic expression, but believe me; not being forced to talk is great! No, I don’t mean that we have nothing to say to each other any more – or, he or she won’t listen to a special reason… . I am talking about a deep understanding between people, who are together and are able to share time in quiet and silent happiness.
After a long and strenuous day, it is a real big comfort to sit and lean back, read all the (old!) newspapers and magazines from the last days and weeks while enjoying a glass of wine and a handful of peanuts. A crossword puzzle is easier to solve while having a “silent” radio program in the background, instead of a “roars to hell” television show.
Try it. It’s indeed relaxing after traffic woes, the heat and dust of the day, telephones’ ringing, machine rattling, meetings and never ending discussions. Why should we talk right now?
Feeling safe and secure, inseparable, indestructible with peace in our minds and our surroundings, this is what we really mean to each other, understanding without words. At home, somewhere in the garden, at a beach – there are many wonderful places. And, suddenly out of the blue from the bottom of our heart and from the depth of comfort and ease, we might be able to speak about things, which couldn’t be discussed earlier. A good talk grows – but without compulsion or constraint or obligation, desperate or being forced.
Try it, and it might feel like walking hand-in-hand on a lonely sand beach, such as “once upon a time” with our first partner. And, unexpectedly: we become silent again AND thankful for it.
We really seldom take a break. We spend too much time in this terrible and frightful loud world.
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