Happy 4th of July to 70% of you

I know that not everyone who visits me here at Life of an Architect celebrates the 4th of July, but for 3,728,337 of you who do (70.17%), I thought I would take the time to wish those people a Happy Independence Day.

The United States doesn’t technically have any national holidays (where businesses have to be closed by law) but since I don’t want to get into how the US federal government can create federal holidays for itself, or that constitutional authority to create holidays is a powered reserved to individual states, I am going to say that there are really only 11 Holidays in my life that I pay any sort of attention to:

New Years Day (Jan 1st)
Valentine’s Day (Feb 14th)
My Wife’s Birthday (April 10th)
My Birthday (April 16th)
Memorial Day (Last Monday in May)
Independence Day (July 4th)
My Daughter’s Birthday (July 10th)
My Wedding Anniversary (September 9th)
Halloween (October 31st)
Thanksgiving (4th Thursday in November)
Christmas (Dec 25th)

Of these 11, only Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Independence Day have any sort of tradition associated with them in my household. I generally love the 4th of July despite the fact that it is technically a one-day holiday, the holiday itself generally is a multi-day affair. I can always count on a neighborhood parade, beer drinking, BBQ, and fireworks.

I don’t know if it’s because I am getting older, or if it’s because I have a family of my own, but traditions are far more important to me now than when I was younger. The idea that I am setting up a purposeful pattern of behavior that will be repeated yearly is comforting. Maybe it’s because as a person gets older, their priorities become more distilled and refined with each passing year. I don’t need to figure out what I like to do and what makes me happy anymore – I’ve finally figured those things out … or maybe this is the way I’m justifying what I do – or more importantly – what I don’t do. Maybe it’s this same sort of thinking holds true with architects as they get older, they figure out the priority list of things that are important to them in the design process and don’t have to figure out or start from scratch with every new project. This would certainly allow for the effort required to refine the solutions …