Like a lot of old people, I've come to find myself adrift at Christmas.
Family mostly gone. Friends busy with their own.
I never found a home in humanity. So here I sit.
There's a certain irony. I was always the Yuletide warrior: the guy who spent the year sourcing gifts, and immediately on first December, sent cards, decked halls, logged kitchen hours, all while listening to holiday music, alternating between seasonal radio and my ever-expanding battery of Christmas albums.
Who knew the holidays were yet another thing you eventually don't qualify for if you're not married?
I'm told there's an entire nation of us, we solitaries. Though we mostly don't know each other. Isolation is best performed alone.
But fear not. This isn't another treatise on the maudlin holiday of the outlier.
Because I've come to spread the good news of Zen.
I've said it before: Zen practice doesn't end suffering. It just helps you suffer better.
A fact of which I'm well-reminded in December.
Sure, I'd love to have a warm home full of love and children. Somebody to give to. Somebody to share with.
But I can always cherish the desire itself. In spite of our Western thoughtways – our conviction that life has a scoreboard, marking each passing second "earned" or "unearned" – just the belief in Christmas is joy enough.
There's also something to be said for standing outside of a thing to fully see into it. Clear-seeing is harder to pull off from too close.
As my world has shrunk to a room, I've gained a great deal of pleasure in this season. All that's going on around me. The responses that weather and light and sights and smells elicit. The memories, and yes, even the unrealised dreams.
They were good dreams. And I'm grateful that my society maintains this calendar month of sesshin to remind us of such things.
It's important to affirm that our insistence on separating people into winners and losers is delusion.
So this Christmas, as in the past, I'm once again listening to my Christmas radio playlist – over thirty holiday stations worldwide. And if it's hard to get too excited about baking for just myself, I've still got chai and sourdough coffee cake, and pumpkin soup for Christmas Eve, and hoppin' john on New Year's.
And I'll get to have Christmas dinner with my sister and her family. If my circle has dwindled to little more at this stage, it's also true that I look forward to that all year.
And the knowledge that even that isn't guaranteed, in this world of dew, keeps me treasuring it.
So once again I'll sit through midnight on New Year's Eve, holding mudra, minding my posture, and smiling inwardly as the fireworks drive this year out, never to be seen again.
And into that vacuum will immediately tumble… something else.
Creation is infinite. And I am small.
A heartfelt Merry Christmas to all my brothers and sisters. And if that's foreign to your practice, then at minimum, a deep December full of cheer and contemplation.
PS: If you've yet to discover Internet radio, and would like a taste, Christmas Radio Malta is one of my favourites. Their website player is dead, but you can click here on their stream URL to open it in your browser, or paste it into your media player.
I'm listening to it now.
(Photo of the Jellyfish Galaxy [ESO 137-001] and surrounding space courtesy of NASA and Wikipedia Commons.)
I don’t have a URL, so hope this gets through. You are certainly not alone in your experience—Manfred was ALWAYS sad at Christmas—had everything to do with parents not getting along during his childhood. He was happily married to me but that could not lift his spirits around Yuletide. I cannot change your feelings about this—but do want to tell you that you hold a special place in my heart. You came roaring through for me when I needed that. You stepped into Manfred’s Celebration of Life and managed it so well. I will always be grateful and consider you my Friend.
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