Seven Reasons Why Glastonbury Festival is a Year-Round Resilience Boost
Resilience is built via ritual: you’ll be stronger for the reps
🙋♀️ Hands up who’s sick to death of people wanging on about Glastonbury Festival! Scroll on, my friend. Scroll on.
😃 If you’re still here, I come with specific reflections that might resonate with you, whether you were in those fields, watched it on TV or simply want a clue as to what the fuss is about.
Very much not ‘down the front’ for Jack White’s secret gig at The Park, Glasto 2022.
🎟 For me, it’s ritual. I’ve been to Glasto Festival every feasible year since 1998. I love it. I worked first as a journalist, then as a walkabout. This 50th anniversary I appreciate it for being part of the fabric of my life. And when something happens ritualistically, it boosts resilience.
Psychologist Christine Legare gave a talk last year on The Resilience of Ritual. “There’s a very good reason that people spend time, money, and energy engaging in rituals”, she explained. “They’re essential to meeting our physical, social, psychological needs – particularly in the face of adversity.”
🎪 I agree with Legare. At Glastonbury, I ritualise to the max and build my resilience into the bargain. I get to:
🗂 1. Plan
Yes, you plan for Glasto. It doesn’t change that much. Same place, same time, 99 percent same schtick. SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) goals are a great way to stay task-orientated and avoid overwhelm.
🃏 2. Improvise
True, you can’t totally plan for Glasto. Rain, heat, mud, (lack of) phone signal, (all the) other people, exhaustion, aches and pains. You go with the flow. It’s 100 percent improvisation’s core tenet of ‘Yes, And’!
🎁 3. Be Present
Being in nature, making memories and, inevitably, enjoying a digital detox are crucial to fully experience this ritual, even when it’s hard work. King of Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, wrote: “Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.”
🙆♀️ 4. Test My Stretch Zone
It’s exhilarating to be put through paces and survive. You discover what’s important. As a rookie journo I interviewed founder Michael Eavis a few days before my first visit, back in’95. I asked how he’d feel about any mud. He bellowed: “What does that have to do with anything?!” Fair; it’s a detail.
⚖️ 5. Compare
“Comparison is the thief of joy”, as Roosevelt said. However, ‘past self’ comparisons can be useful. Glasto is an annual routine outside all other routine and thus easy progress marker. I’m a different (clean, sober, married parent) person now from 25 years ago. It’s interesting.
🌈 6. Sing, Dance and Be Merry
Dancing and singing and group fun reduce stress hormone cortisol and release happy hormones: endorphins (painkiller) and dopamine (mood-booster) and oxytocin (‘love drug’). The more we create positive, habitual pathways and imprint a route to joy, the easier good habits become.
🙏 7. Ritualise
At Glasto, there are rituals within rituals. Strolling to the Stone Circle, or a Healing Fields chai tent, that Brothers Bar pear cider, getting ‘down the front’, seeing the dawn: rituals are honoured habits that build resilience, especially when faced with uncertainty or danger – during, say, a pandemic.
The pandemic certainly made resilience more challenging. However, as Cristine Legard puts it, “Resisting change is part of the structural fabric of ritual… we still need these critical life events to be commemorated; to be respected.
I’ll raise a chai to that.