Our team won the World Cup; always amazing when that happens. The city came out on the streets to celebrate. My son got calls from his friends and asked if we could go out and join. I wasn't sure I wanted to, but it's not something you say no to. So we walked down to the main junction near our home.

There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people out there, celebrating with loud music on portable speakers, lights, and some firecrackers even. People were on top of cars, some on the roofs of buses. Some would say it was high energy. I found it to be a little overwhelming, to be honest. I was excited that our team had won, but my celebration would have been limited to high-fiving the people around me and maybe giving them a hug. I saw that my son was also a little bewildered. This was the first time he had stepped out on the streets when such an event was happening.

And then it happened. I heard the familiar booming siren of an ambulance in the distance as it approached the junction slowly through the crowd. The driver honked, in addition to the siren, as the vehicle came to a standstill. Some people tried moving, but there seemed to be nowhere to go. The crowd was so immersed in the celebrations that even the loud siren probably felt like a part of the music and the screaming.

My son and I watched from the pavement. Wishing we could help. Knowing we were helpless. There was almost no way even we could get to that ambulance on foot.

Everyone in that crowd was probably a decent person who knowingly would never have blocked an ambulance. But a celebration doesn't announce itself as a blockade. Not one of them thought of themselves as standing between a patient and a hospital; they thought of themselves as celebrating, and the road just happened to be where the celebration was. In the frenzy, they collectively became the potential cause of someone suffering a severe health threat, potentially even a risk to their life.

From a distance, it was evident that this wasn't okay. But get close enough, and it seemed like the happiness in the crowd automatically made everything else irrelevant. I can't get past the fact that thousands of people collectively made a decision that not one of them would have made alone — that someone else's emergency was not worth dampening the celebrations. It's uncanny how a celebration can seem such an innocuous thing to the ones celebrating, while the same celebration can push someone experiencing an emergency, or suffering the fallout of it, beyond the edge.

The test I always apply is simple. Would you accept the same thing in reverse? If your mother or a loved one were in that ambulance, would you discount the celebration as a warranted, innocuous, and justified event? Having been part of similar celebrations yourself, would you understand if you were the one dealing with the emergency? The strangers in that ambulance had families too, who would have felt exactly what you would have felt.

It's not just sport. There are countless such occasions, some stemming from religious customs, some from cultural traditions, and some simply things that have come to be. The common thread with most of them is that there are almost always two sides: the ones thoroughly enjoying the celebration, and the ones severely affected by it.

And none of this requires anyone to stop celebrating. That's what I want to be clear about. The crowd could have parted for the ambulance and closed up again behind it, and lost perhaps ninety seconds of the night. The celebration survives that easily. What it can't survive is nobody thinking to do it. On a normal day, most people would agree that it isn't civil or courteous to block a common space indiscriminately. No one would want to be the person in the ambulance. And yet happiness, ironically, seems to drive the common sense out of us.

If this is what happiness does to us, what hope can we have from ourselves in trying times, if they ever happen to fall upon us? This seems as silly to me as a mountaineer reaching their summit and celebrating by tossing all their gear in the air.

I don't get it.