Marking Milestones: A Spiritual Need

Milestones. We all have them. Sometimes we mark them and sometimes we don’t. This year, we are marking milestones in new ways. What’s important, it seems, is not how we mark them, but that we mark them.

In these COVID months, I’ve witnessed many creative ways of celebrating – a drive by birthday party, a farewell youtube video, a honking caravan of decorated cars announcing “It’s a girl!”  — and I even participated in a remote birthday party for my own granddaughter, singing happy birthday and watching her blow out her candles over the internet.

Why do we mark our milestones? Why do we still bother when it might be easier to let an occasion slip by? How do we choose which milestones to mark and which to let pass?

This summer, I was presented with a milestone of my own, one of those round birthdays that marks the completion of one decade and the entrance into the next. As the day approached, I was feeling a sense of urgency which I eventually named as “awareness of the preciousness of time,” and I was also feeling gratitude. I marked the day with a simple celebration, received cards and phone calls and facebook birthday wishes. It seemed like enough. Milestone sufficiently marked!

But a week or so later, the sensation of preciousness was changing back into a sense of urgency. One morning, while it was still dark outside, I took time to reflect on the meaning of my life to this point. I filled up a page of my journal and part of the next. I made a list of what I’ve done and who I’ve been, and as I read over what I had written, it comforted me. It was as if I needed to stop and savor the life I have lived until now before I could continue on with the rest of my life. In that savoring and celebrating, the urgency changed back to preciousness again.

I considered as I closed my journal that the marking of milestones slows us down, and allows us to expand a brief moment in time into a bigger memory to hold onto. It makes the moment almost tangible. I thought of the story about the indigenous people who carried the missionaries’ supplies up the mountain and how they refused to budge after being hurried by the European missionaries, saying, “we must wait here for our souls to catch up with us.” Perhaps we celebrate to slow down our lives for a moment and let our souls catch up with us. Perhaps celebrations serve a spiritual need.

Have you marked a milestone in a different way recently? Did it slow you down enough? Or is it in need of more savoring?

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