It’s Bank Holiday weekend.

Strange how we hold on to these relics of a time gone by. These customs. These traditions. Long beyond their time in a sense.

Bank Holidays have been around in current form since the late 1800s and were all associated with important religious festivals and agricultural holidays before they were enacted into law by the Victorians.  So many go back even further. May Day only became an official bank holiday in 1971, but its roots as a holiday stretch back to pre-Christian pagan festivals, and the familiar rituals of crowning of the May Queen and dancing around the Maypole made it a popular seasonal celebration in medieval England.

So why do we keep traditions?

Sure we enjoy the day off, but we don’t bring the holiday into the present context; rather, we hang on to a relevance long gone.

It is like that too with our lives more broadly.  We hold on to behaviour and thinking rituals which often served us well as children.  No longer useful as adults, we keep them still; almost shackled to the tradition.

We do this with learning too. Learning skills and ways of being which suit one role, but still practicing them in others, such as later careers we may undertake, or even in parenting, or other life roles.

Strange our love of the past.