Emotions

I started noticing something odd about our need to gather fifteen years ago. As our societal reliance on the internet became more pervasive in the early part of this new millennium, the annual percentage increase in the number of festivals worldwide grew at double the overall population growth.

History and anthropology reveal the human desire for gathering, expressed throughout the ages in ecstatic celebrations of worshipping, conversing, feasting, consuming, and dancing. It is intriguing how many well-known secular festivals were birthed from their sacred roots of “danced religion” with Carnival being the best known.

Just before throwing my every-five-year birthday extravaganza in 2015, my good friend Ben helped me to see one of my gifts. He called me a “social alchemist,” a mixologist of people. It probably comes from my upbringing being the “curious white boy” in an inner-city high school, throwing dance parties with my diverse set of multicultural friends.

The term "workaholism" is now 50 years old and deeply ingrained into our American lexicon, which makes sense considering that the average American works 200 more hours per year today than they did when the word was first coined.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Conversely, if you open your mouth to speak and you can’t make a sound, do you still have a voice? For the past week, I’ve been living with the latter, not by choice and not knowing for how long I will exist this way.

On the 20th anniversary of my boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre, we invited 10,000 people with the name Joy from California to a “Joy Party” at our Hotel Vitale on San Francisco’s waterfront with the first 50 of them receiving a free room for the night (hence, a “Joy Slumber Party”). Tears of Joy streamed all night.

Living in Baja, it’s easy to forget just how brutal the winter can be on one’s emotions. I recently read a New York Times review of “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times” in which the author describes “wintering” as “a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress or cast into the role of an outsider...However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.”

I remember lots of tears that spring. Surprising for a guy who doesn’t cry much. My world was crashing down on me in 2008. As a hotel entrepreneur, we were a canary in the coal mine as we experienced the early punishment of the coming Great Recession.

A year is made up of days. A day is made up of minutes. You can influence your year by choosing how you invest those minutes. I recommend you invest four minutes and 25 seconds watching this video that MEA alum Joey Del Hierro sent me that reminds us, even in a quarantined pandemic, beautiful music can be made.

Graduations, weddings, birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, baby showers, and reunions. We all love rituals. They represent the momentous and profound moments of our lives. Unfortunately, they’ve all but disappeared during the pandemic.