Should You Celebrate Yourself Before You Celebrate Others?

People want to treat this like an either/or. It isn't. Picture your life as a balance scale, with you sitting on one pan and everyone else on the other. Pile too much weight on either side and the thing tips over. Lopsided living breeds a particular kind of sourness: resentment, grouchiness, sometimes plain greed. Think of the person nothing ever satisfies, the one who is impossible to please. Hand a child too much candy and suddenly none of it tastes like anything. You grind away so that someday you can enjoy life, and then there's no time left to enjoy anything. You hurry through the good parts and miss them. The best trips I ever took were the ones where we stopped watching the clock and just paid attention to the place, the people with us, the talk, the whole shared thing.

Savoring is the simple act of enjoying what you already have in your hands. Clean sheets. Corn on the cob fresh off the stalk. A car that's just been washed. Company that shows up without warning and turns out to be welcome anyway. Part of savoring is letting yourself accept a change of pace when one gets handed to you. Remember snow days back in school? A whole free day to go out and roll around in it. Did anyone ever genuinely mourn the lost class time? Once, stuck in a dead-stop jam on the interstate after a wreck up ahead, I pulled out a book. I'd already read it, so I read it again. I could have spent that hour muttering about the traffic and about having nothing new to read. Instead the minutes slipped by because I'd slid back into a story I knew.

There was a song once called "Enjoy Yourself, It's Later Than You Think." You have to wonder whether whoever wrote it understood how right they were. Then again, maybe you're so wrapped up in enjoying yourself that nobody else gets a slice of your time. Grandma, grandpa, are you too booked with golf tournaments and card games and committee meetings to watch the grandchildren? It's easy to tell yourself they'll be more fun and less trouble once they're older. Funny how the time never materializes then either.

Maybe you're the opposite. You turn up for every meeting your club or church puts on. You've held every office, some of them several years running. People say they truly don't know what they'd do without you. The family has learned you're the one they can call at the last second to babysit, and they call. You tell your friends you'd love to do something with them, then back out because some family obligation landed on top of it. You booked a trip for a day that mattered to you, paid the nonrefundable fees, and then stayed home because someone needed something and that counted for more than what you'd planned.

Is wallflower practically your legal name? Do you step back and let everyone else collect the credit, the prizes, the celebrations of their big moments? Would it shock you if nobody came to your funeral, or if your own relatives skipped the memorial altogether? Some people, while they're still breathing, actually tell their families to do exactly that.

What's needed is a decent balance. You matter as much as the people around you, and they matter as much as you. Both giving and receiving belong in the equation. Figuring out what would genuinely please you right now can turn into the seed of something you do for someone else down the line. Parents of small children tend to understand this instinctively. So do families caring for someone chronically ill, or the ones absorbing a sudden death.

Giving matters. So does gratitude. Giving as a way of saying thanks is about the most honest thanks there is. You hand me a bit of what you have, and I pass a bit of what I have along to the next person. Call it the daisy chain of gratitude. I can't repay you for the tank of gas that got me to the doctor, but maybe I can go mow the neighbor's lawn. You know the old chain reaction: somebody wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, kicks the cat, the cat scratches the dog, the dog bites the mailman, and on it goes. Start your morning decently and there's no telling how far the good turn travels.

Ever skip a meal to get something done, maybe for somebody else, and then get so ravenous you snap somebody's head off? Was that plan sound to begin with? Running yourself empty in the name of self-sacrifice can curdle into what some call gunny sacking, where you quietly expect people to pay you back even though you never asked, or to quit asking you for favors, or to tell you no once in a while when you offer.

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