Every day is a holiday: Your personal calendar
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 05/09/2021

There's nothing like that feeling on holidays, that feeling that there's something special about the day.
So I often like to think, why can't we have that more often?
There's maybe, here in Canada, around 10 official holidays.
You can add all kinds of traditional holidays, an extra 10 maybe, and throw in some other holidays here and there, and yeah, maybe you can come up to about 10% of your days being somehow holidays.
But why can't it be higher?
Why can't we find something special about almost every day?
In a way it's kind of arbitrary because a day is a day and we're just marking it on a calendar somehow, giving it name and number, and maybe assigning it some kind of significance.
Like if I think of the most traditional, classic holiday in my part of the world is Christmas.
So Christmas Day has this special feeling to it, because it's Christmas.
But of course, it's just another day, and we simply choose to label it as this special holiday and observe it.
So we could do this more, and we don't need to depend only on existing traditional holidays.
Why not create our own holidays?
Why not create our own traditions, our own calendar, so that we can really feel with each day that there is something special about the day.
Now, of course, we can't- maybe we don't want to make all 365+ days as holidays.
Then maybe you would just be wishing for an ordinary day.
Because it's OK to have ordinary days too.
But maybe those ordinary days could be half the year, maybe even two-thirds of the year, but not like almost every day the way we have it now.
You could have even up to half of your days be somehow special days.
And we have this creativity to make it whatever we want.
So I like this idea of having a personal calendar where you can create your own significant days.
So of course, we could start with the basic calendar.
I lay it out in a spreadsheet.
I have one line per day, and then I have different things to say about that day in each column.
So it could start with the basic date, just your normal months and days, and lay that out, and then you can have all your official holidays, your traditional holidays, and lay all those out.
Then I also like to lay out the seasonal events, like the equinoxes, solstices, the solar events.
You can lay out the lunar months.
You can lay out the weekdays, have all that laid out.
And then, on top of this sort of basic template, you can add any day that's significant for you.
So the first thing that comes to mind is, of course, birthdays.
We all have our family and friends that every year their birthdays come around and we acknowledge them and we celebrate them.
So why not think of that as an actual holiday on your personal calendar?
It's like that person's day becomes as official a holiday as Labour Day or Christmas or whatever it is on YOUR calendar.
So your year cycles through all the people that you choose to celebrate.
So I like this idea, and I'm experimenting with it now, been doing that with this year, and even more with next year, bringing in more of these birthdays, and looking for just anything to make each day special.
Because of course, each day could be anything.
Each day has the chance to be anything.
And in some ways, each day is just a day, and we can name it whatever we want.
So why not name it something that inspires us to see what's special about that day, to do something unique with that day, and do this through making our own calendar?
So I'd love to hear if you have any other ideas of what can we add to our personal calendar?
And let's make each day special.

#personalcalendar #holidayeveryday #birthdaycalendar