Happy Hour

In many countries of the world pubs, inns, and restaurants advertise a Happy Hour. Usually in the early evening, Happy Hour is marked by reduced prices for drinks in a marketing effort to get customers in at a time when the venue is quiet.

In Australia graduating High School students engage in what is known as Schoolies Week. This is a week following the end of final year exams. Sadly, this time can be marred by heavy drinking, drugs, and violence.

Both these cultural occasions may be poor substitutes for activities now lost from our westernised experience.

Thousands of years ago before we began to settle in large towns and villages, our community would have come together around a fire. We would have shared food, told stories, sung songs, and danced together. It would have been a time for rejoicing, laughing, and connecting. It would have been the time when stories of the hunt would have been told, or the location of a tree about to bear fruit was mentioned. Perhaps an Elder or the Shaman of the clan would have re-enacted the clan’s history.

Is this what Happy Hour tries to duplicate, but without understanding what it is being resurrected? Without true Elders and Shaman Happy Hour can only ever be a semblance of what has been.

So too, Schoolies Week is a pitiable surrogate for the coming-of-age rituals that once marked the transition from childhood to adulthood in our cultural past?

Yet there is a memory in these modern-day events. Although we may have lost and forgotten the ceremonies, rituals, and rites that marked our time many millennia ago, we instinctively know that something is missing.

How many other modern-day customs are an attempt to re-engage with something primally human? Yet, many of these modern customs have been stripped of their sacredness and their significance. Here are just a few that come to mind:

Childbirth. Once a ceremony and rite involving the women of the community it is now often confined to a sterile hospital setting and overseen by men.

Education. Once an ongoing aspect of life where one learnt throughout the day, and as things arose, in an outdoor setting. Nowadays, education is shut off inside classrooms and lasts only a limited number of years.

Elderhood. Once a respected role in a community, a true Elder held the sacred knowledge and wisdom of the clan. Today, very few true Elders remain, and we have substituted it with “Olders” who are then siphoned off to Old Folks Homes, away from the community.

If our bodies retain a memory of ancient rituals, ceremonies, and rites, then can we reach into the depths of our collective soul to regain the meaning and sacredness of them?

Just a thought to ponder.