The Humanist
Change on the Danube: What a Fireworks Show Taught Me About Resilience, Transformation, and My Own Yellow Energy
A personal reflection on Saint Stephen's Day in Budapest: how a drone & fireworks show on the Danube became a mirror for personal change, resilience, and energy.
I've watched the drone and fireworks show on the Danube for Saint Stephen's Day more times than you could expect. Every August 20th, Budapest turns the river into a stage: light and colour tracing the same stories, the same fire, the same crown catching the same sky. It's a ritual I know by heart.
This year was different.
Not because the show itself changed all that much, though it had. It was different because for the first time, I wasn't just watching a celebration of Hungary's founding. I was standing inside my own story of change, watching it reflected back at me from the water.
A Celebration of Change, Watched Through the Lens of My Own
Saint Stephen — Szent István — is remembered as the king who turned a confederation of tribes into a state, who chose transformation over the comfort of the familiar. Every year, the fireworks retell that story: the founding, the crown, the decision to become something new. It's a national story about resilience and development, compressed into fifteen minutes of light over water.
This year, I watched it as someone who had just made a founding decision of my own.
A few days earlier, I had ended a chapter I'd carried for a long time: what I've come to call my "TA on behalf of" chapter, a way of operating that had quietly stopped fitting who I was becoming. It wasn't a dramatic exit. It was the answer to something that had been building for a while: a kind of internal noise that got louder until it was impossible to keep working around it. I recognised, uncomfortably, that the dissatisfaction I felt mirrored something bigger happening around me: a country that had also reached its own point of "enough," and had just chosen a new direction, a new leadership, a new communication style, entirely its own.
I didn't plan that timing. I couldn't have. But standing on the riverbank, it stopped feeling like coincidence and started feeling like resonance.
The Wind, the Colours, the Coincidence
Partway through the show, the wind picked up, strong, sudden, cutting through the heat that had been sitting over the city all day. Everyone around me reacted the same way: shoulders dropping, faces tilting up, a small collective sigh of relief.
For me, it meant something else too. That wind felt like the wind of change I'd been living through not metaphorically comfortable, but literally, physically present. Change rarely announces itself politely. It shows up, disrupts the heat you'd gotten used to, and forces you to notice it.
Rediscovering My Yellow Energy
If you've ever done an Insights Discovery profile, you'll know the four colour energies: Fiery Red (drive, urgency), Cool Blue (precision, structure), Earth Green (steadiness, care), and Sunshine Yellow (optimism, connection, spontaneity, ideas).
Across years of corporate life, I'd leaned hard into the energies that I could more comfortably dial in, and felt more "adequate". Yellow — the energy of enthusiasm, of the unplanned, of trusting an idea before it's fully proven — kept getting deprioritised. Not because I didn't have it, but because it didn't feel "strategic" enough to lead with.
What was calling me now, the thing that had been "screaming inside" as I put it to myself, was a Yellow-ish call. It was the part of me that wants to try the unknown chapter, that's drawn to risk not because it's safe but because it's alive.
Insights Discovery isn't just a workplace tool for understanding colleagues. Used honestly, it's a map for self-development, a way of noticing which energy you've been avoiding, and asking what you might unlock if you finally gave it room.
Development Doesn't Wait for a Stable Environment
I'll be honest: the timing isn't ideal. The global environment right now doesn't offer much reassurance: economically, politically, personally. Choosing to interrupt something stable in favour of something undefined is, by most conventional logic, a risky move.
But resilience was never about waiting for the perfect conditions. Szent István didn't unify a kingdom because the moment was safe and convenient: he did it despite the uncertainty, because the alternative was staying smaller than what was possible. Hungary's own political shift this year followed the same logic: a population that decided the discomfort of change was preferable to the fatigue of staying the same.
I think that's the real throughline of this year's celebration for me. Transformation — personal or national — rarely arrives on a convenient schedule. It arrives when the internal signal gets too loud to keep managing around it, and you decide the unknown is worth the risk.
What This Year's Show Actually Gave Me
I came to the Danube expecting a fireworks show. I left with something closer to a personal insight:
- Change doesn't need permission from your circumstances, indeed it just needs you to stop resisting the wind.
- Resilience isn't the absence of risk; it's choosing direction despite it.
- Development often means picking back up an energy — a colour, a way of showing up — that you'd quietly shelved for something safer.
- Sometimes the clearest insights about yourself arrive not in a workshop or a review, but in a coincidence you didn't plan for, standing outside, watching the sky.
I still don't know exactly what "HomeKettő" — my second home, this country I've chosen to make my own for now — will look like a year from now. I don't know what shape my own next chapter takes either.
But for the first time in a while, I'm not trying to control that. I'm letting the Yellow lead for a bit, and seeing where it takes me.