Nothing to Do With Fireworks

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Every year around this time, I find myself in a slightly odd position. As a Scot living in America, I’ll probably end up watching fireworks with friends, enjoying the atmosphere and appreciating how much the day means to the people around me. But it isn’t my celebration, so I’ve always experienced it slightly from the outside. Recently, though, I realised that what interests me most isn’t really the holiday itself, but the fireworks.

Fireworks are designed to do exactly what they’re supposed to do. They’re loud, impossible to ignore and, for a few moments, everybody stops and looks in the same direction. Children stare upwards with the same fascination as their grandparents. Conversations pause halfway through a sentence. Even people who insist they’re not particularly interested almost always find themselves looking up when the first one goes off. There are very few things left that can still command our collective attention in quite the same way.

I found myself wondering whether that’s part of their appeal. We live in an age where attention is constantly fragmented and our thoughts rarely stay in one place for very long. Yet fireworks still possess the ability to gather thousands of people together and direct their gaze towards exactly the same point in the sky. For a few brief moments, there is something strangely reassuring about that shared experience.

Perhaps that’s why they also seem to have become a rather good metaphor for the way many of us imagine life is supposed to unfold. I don’t think any of us consciously believe that a meaningful life should consist of one spectacular moment after another. That would be an impossible standard to live with. Yet we’re surrounded by stories that quietly suggest exactly that. The moments that matter are presented as the visible ones. They’re the promotions, the announcements, the celebrations and the milestones that other people can recognise without explanation. Somewhere along the way, it’s easy to begin believing that significance and visibility are somehow the same thing.

I’ve started to suspect they aren’t. Perhaps that’s why we have the curious habit of assigning importance in advance. We’ve all been asked whether an upcoming birthday is “a big one”, as though certain numbers possess an intrinsic significance that others don’t. Once we’ve decided that an occasion should matter, it can become surprisingly difficult to experience it without feeling an obligation to rise to the occasion ourselves. Instead of simply having a birthday, we find ourselves trying to have the kind of birthday that deserves to be remembered. I sometimes wonder how many of our expectations work like that, not because we’ve consciously chosen them, but because we’ve quietly absorbed the idea that important moments ought to announce themselves in advance.

The older I get, the less convinced I become that life really works like that. It strikes me that one of the quietest mistakes we make is confusing what is visible with what is valuable. The two overlap from time to time, but they’re far from identical, and the distance between them often only becomes clear with hindsight. Some of the moments we anticipated for years gradually become part of everyday life almost as soon as they arrive, while other moments, so ordinary they barely seemed worth noticing at the time, quietly alter the course of everything that follows.

That feels slightly at odds with the way we naturally pay attention. We instinctively celebrate the moment someone crosses a finish line, yet rarely think about the thousands of quiet mornings that made it possible. We congratulate people on promotions and new beginnings because those are the moments we can see. The slower, less visible work of becoming someone capable of carrying those responsibilities usually passes unnoticed, sometimes even by the person doing it. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve begun to wonder whether we’ve been looking in the wrong direction all along.

When I look back over my own life, that’s certainly what happened to me. If you’d asked me over the years to point to the moments that changed everything, I’d almost certainly have listed the obvious ones. Moving to America would have been near the top. It was a significant career move, a huge life change and, understandably, the thing everybody around me wanted to talk about. Looking back now, I realise that while it was certainly important, it wasn’t where the deepest change was taking place.

At the same time as I was building a new life in America, my relationship with alcohol was becoming steadily worse. The two things existed alongside one another, although I don’t think I appreciated that at the time because my attention, like everyone else’s, naturally settled on the visible milestone. That’s where the congratulations were. That’s where the photographs were. That’s where the story seemed to be.

It took me years to realise that the move itself wasn’t the thing that ultimately shaped my life. If anything, it simply provided the circumstances in which I could no longer avoid confronting myself. That wasn’t a particularly dramatic revelation when it happened. There wasn’t a single conversation or one defining moment when everything suddenly made sense. It was much quieter than that. Looking back, though, I can see that the life I have today owes far more to the things nobody noticed at the time than to the things everybody did.

It’s surprisingly easy to notice events because they have clear edges. They begin on a particular day and, more often than not, they can be marked on a calendar. A new job starts on Monday. You move house on Friday. A birthday arrives whether you’re ready for it or not. These moments have a satisfying certainty about them because we know when they’ve happened.

The changes that seem to matter most don’t usually arrive like that. They have no obvious beginning and very rarely announce an ending. They emerge so gradually that they can feel almost imperceptible from one day to the next. It is only when enough time has passed that we realise our relationship with something has quietly altered, or that we’ve stopped reacting in the way we once did, or that an opinion we held with absolute conviction no longer feels quite so certain.

I’ve often thought that’s one of the reasons therapy has remained such a constant in my life. I started going years ago, at a time when it wasn’t something many people in Britain spoke about openly. If you’d asked me after my first session whether it had changed my life, I’d almost certainly have laughed at the question. The second session didn’t change my life either, nor the third. There wasn’t a particular conversation that suddenly explained everything or a single afternoon when I walked out feeling like a different person, although my therapist and I still laugh about the evening I was on the Tube heading to a session after work and burst into tears in the middle of rush hour. Looking back, there is something wonderfully ironic about choosing one of the most stereotypically British settings imaginable in which to have an emotional breakthrough.

Yet I’ve now spent well over a decade having those conversations, and I sometimes wonder whether that’s exactly the point. Therapy never asked me to become somebody else. It simply encouraged me to notice myself a little more honestly than I had before. Most weeks that didn’t feel particularly remarkable. Looking back, it may well have been one of the most significant decisions I’ve ever made.

I suspect many of the things that shape us work in much the same way. They rarely compete for our attention because they emerge so gradually that there is very little to notice from one day to the next. Instead, they become part of the fabric of our lives almost without us realising, until one day we look back and discover we’ve become someone who sees the world a little differently from the person we used to be.

Perhaps the mistake isn’t that we spend too much time celebrating fireworks. It’s that we’ve become rather selective about what we think deserves them.

When I think about the moments that have genuinely shaped my life, they aren’t the promotions, the moves or the milestones that other people could immediately recognise. The moments I return to most often are much quieter than that. They’re the occasions where I realised something about myself that I hadn’t been willing, or perhaps hadn’t been able, to see before. Looking back, those moments didn’t feel particularly dramatic at the time. If anything, they felt strangely ordinary. Life carried on exactly as it had the day before. Nothing outwardly had changed. Yet everything was different because I understood myself differently.

To me, those moments feel like the real fireworks. Not because they announce the end of a journey, but because they illuminate the beginning of one.

The display itself lasts only a moment. What matters is everything that follows afterwards. Once you’ve recognised something that is true about yourself, it becomes surprisingly difficult to return to the person you believed yourself to be before. The quiet work doesn’t end there. In many ways, that’s where it really begins, because recognition asks something of us. It asks us to live consistently with what we’ve seen.

I wonder whether that’s why the quieter parts of life have become so much more important to me over the years. They are where that work happens. They’re where patience is practised rather than admired, where relationships are strengthened through ordinary conversations rather than grand gestures and where identity evolves so gradually that we rarely notice it until we look back and realise we’ve been becoming ourselves for much longer than we thought.

I’ll still stand with everyone else and watch the fireworks this weekend because they really are beautiful. I just don’t think they’re the best metaphor for success anymore. If anything, they’re a reminder that the moments which briefly illuminate our lives only have meaning because of everything that came before them, and because of everything they quietly set in motion afterwards.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, and which quiet moments in your own life have shaped you more than the milestones you once thought would define you.

Eric x

P.S. If this resonated with you, my book, 12 Steps to Success: Finding Your Purpose (Find it on Amazon), explores many of these quieter moments of growth in more depth. And if you enjoy these kinds of conversations, you’ll also find them on the 12 Steps to Success Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts.