At the risk of sounding all “bah humbug”, I am not a traditional celebration kind of person. Other than occasionally visiting a simple, low-key restaurant, which we do anyway, we don’t make a big deal out of birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, etc. We don’t give gifts or have parties. Having to plan the excruciating minutiae of details seems more like a punishment.

That isn’t to say I live in a state of joyless grey. Far from it! Every day, I am inundated with a tsunami of wonder and excitement from all directions. Every morning, I look out and see some new vegetable or flower emerging from my garden, and I’m amazed that sun, soil, and water can create such perfection.

I pass by my bookshelves on the way back inside and am bowled over by how fortunate I am to be literate, and a family that indulged me by taking me to the bookstore every weekend to replace the stack of books I’d devoured the week before. I am so blessed by the rich tapestry of worlds that exist between the covers, and the opportunity to learn from people smarter than I am on a myriad of topics.

I see my cat baking in a sunny patch and hear her deep rumbly purr, and reflect on how much joy that spicy little monster brings me just by existing and deigning to acknowledge my presence now and then.

I feel the air conditioning pour over my arm and am grateful to have been born when I was, as I could not have survived a Middle Eastern summer without that luxury. And my life would be bereft if I had not had the experience of living in a foreign (to me) culture for as long as I have. When I leave my house, my ears fill with a waterfall of languages I don’t understand. Urdu, Arabic, Tagalog, Malayalam, Tamil, Swahili, Afrikaans. It is music that brings me so much joy. My life is a linguistic symphony. These things and a hundred others that pop up every day fill me with more elation than one person has a right to. There is no one celebration to rival this. So, where do I go from here with this prompt? All I will say for now is that it relates to a seasonal migration I discovered in Dubai, and have seen to a lesser extent since moving from the UAE to Qatar.