There is an act of humility and grace to learn and honor tradition. Cultures are born of tradition, foundations of our fabric are built from it, humans cling to it as comfort when everything around them is changing. We teach it, whether we truly understand it or not. When we travel, we immerse ourselves in it and respect it.
I must be honest. I have never been one for tradition…and yet I have always craved it (I know…?!). Maybe because I never had consistency of it in my growing up…a battle of sorts. And when there was a want to have it, it always felt forced…I was trying too hard to make it happen. I’ve always wanted to create traditions over the course of my life…either with myself or those close to me. Why? Oh many reasons…mostly because…’who doesn’t have tradition?’ So, I clung to wanting to create it for me…so I could say, ‘I have tradition.’ Yet, I have always found myself at odds with that ‘want’ since I also constantly embrace change, need to try new things, and rarely believe that something can’t be improved upon…it’s the ‘satisfied…but’ factor of my fabric…
In my travels around the world, tradition is something I love to learn about, question, sit amongst and immerse myself in. In my time spent in Italy….tradizione is weaved into the stones and buildings you walk amongst. It is part of the wrinkles on the elderly faces you encounter and listen to their stories. It is illustrated in the paintings and music that echos through the churches, museums and alleys that weave throughout the cities and countryside…It is in the food you eat, the fabric you wrap yourself in, and the shoes you put on your feet to walk along the cobblestone…
I’ve come to my own conclusion that tradition exists because walking down memory lane – whether it is the smell of the familiar, the visual of a smile, or the reminder of when life was ‘simple’ – has a certain appeal to it. We don’t like to truly ‘let go.’ We like to keep a reminder of the past with us…to be a constant reminder…
Yet…Impermanence is one of the only constants in life.
What I have found in my discussions with others…we have all started to realize that there is humility and respect in tradition…and there is just as much respect in evolving tradition to create the fabric we want going forward…
Tradition provides an illusion of permanence, for a brief period or moment in time…We ‘like’ tradition because we want to create a moment to re-live. And yet we always know…even the same recipe, the same song, the same ornament, the same game…always changes…because we are always changing…
So, this year…embrace tradizione as such…if you want to keep an element of a tradition alive…then let’s do this instead…for all of our benefit…bring the foundational element of it along and with intent, keep it alive by adding something new, something magical, something amazing to it…
And with that, we change the narrative…instead of, ‘we respect our tradition and that is how we have always done it’…we say, ‘our tradition is an evolution of continuing to do what inspires and brings smiles…while respecting the past we have come from.’
If 2020 has shown us anything, it is that traditions can change…and there is beauty in that…in fact…we can be honest, we don’t actually love a lot of the traditions we continue to carry forward…and 2020 has allowed us the grace to not do some of them, tweak some of them and start new ones…because of the immense changing landscape and digital nature of celebrating what in past has been very ‘human oriented’…
Think about it. Tradizione. It’s an amazing gift. Let’s leverage it as such.
(For me…Lights is a tradition that I will continue to love and embrace…my opinion, that’s a tradition we can keep…because every light sparkles in a different way every year, they are hung in a different manner each year…and the colors and shapes change…but across the world…lights are something that we celebrate and weave through many traditions…and LIGHT is something we could all use a bit more of these days…)
