That much has been written about stress during the holidays doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re supersaturated on the subject. I think it just means there’s a near-desperate hunger for discussion. Or maybe more than real dialogue, we need venting or the hysterical catharsis of laughter borne of tension, illustrated by Matt Damon’s recent SNL skit “Best Christmas Ever.” Either way, I know I need to keep talking about it, because de-stressing during this time is a perennial lesson I can’t seem learn, much like “don’t leave a wet swimsuit on the bed.” Specifically: Remember to make a LOT of extra space for myself during Christmas week.
For me, as much as I am aware of the potential T-bone collision created by my own overly helpful caretaking tendencies and my diametrically-opposed need to give myself downtime to write, meditate, walk and sit still with my grief during the holidays, I still run headlong, skidding over ice, helplessly towards it. I think maybe we are all at risk of sliding and skittering, in one way or another, towards a 10-car emotional pileup this time of year. We load up the rituals and gatherings into a stack of expectations that’s both heavy and glittering. But because so much of those expectations are rooted in the Christmases of our youth — and because time, inevitably, takes people away and mutates families — then there is a disconnect, a rigidity that expresses itself in many different ways.
Just over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day alone, I shouted “HURRY!!!” at my husband no less than 7 times, downed far too many glasses of champagne, and had several tiny, pinched and furtive cries in a couple of different bathrooms. I’m not proud of any of that, but I realized, a bit too late, I should have given those tiny cries a bit more respect and space. That was my real Self talking to me – remembering Christmases past and missing my mom and dad, and feeling something deeply and authentically. For as many holidays and birthdays I celebrate in the calendar year, none light up all the sensory and emotional buttons for me like Christmastime. I’ve spun the calendar wheel around again and sing the same song, though the verses have changed. And so, of course this would bring up a wistfulness, a pause of sadness, even. But only because I’ve been loved and am loved, because I’ve had such joyous, happy Christmases in my past, even as I am making them for my children in my present. It’s a shadow sewn into the light, a part of it, but I ignore it every year (“I don’t have time for that;” “I don’t want to be sad at Christmas”), and in so doing, I set myself up to act out all my worst coping skills. I chose to become brittle instead of softening.
Recently, I heard a talk that stressed the importance of celebrating All Souls Day, regardless of creed or faith, on November 1st – the day after Halloween that quietly kicks off the holiday season. The speaker said it was so important to make space for our dead on that day so that we could attend to those losses with real care, well ahead of the bustle and cookie-making parties. She said that we might find a way, maybe a candle or special place in the house, to honor those we loved dearly. And for those with whom the relationship was difficult, we could honor the best of their and our own intentions and make a space to mourn what the relationship might have been. A holiday, in short, to feel grief – in all its multi-colored fullness – all that someone gone made you feel, all the love you shared, alongside the full weight and density of its vacuum. Whew. There’s no shelf space for this on the seasonal aisle of drugstores – no wonder we don’t do much of it. But imagine if we did!
In reality, my reality, I ignore the opportunity to give myself that kind of holiday, and instead coming flying across November 90-miles-an-hour, careening two-thirds of the way across December until I slam into my own personal pile-up, teetering on the edge of canyon between expectations and reality.
The swinging rope bridge across these two great cliffs is, of course, self-compassion. Really radical, intentional, bad-ass self-compassion, that is. Compassion, done well, is so active – and self-compassion so especially powerful. To be Compassionate AF, we must go about finding the work that can be done. And usually it’s work we can barely recognize for ourselves, like my own task (which I rejected at the time) of staying in one of those bathrooms and have a nice, chest-lightening cry.
Xavier LePinchon, one of the world’s leading geologists who founded the field of plate tectonics, shared on Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast what fragility in geology has taught him about fragility in the heart of humanity. Le Pinchon spoke beautifully about the earth’s necessary capacity to accommodate fragility and weakness.
“A capacity to accommodate fragility is a fundament of vital, evolving systems, whether geological or human … Earthquakes happen when weaknesses cannot be expressed. And communities which are rigid, which don’t take into account the weak points in the community, or of people who are in difficulty, tend be communities that do not evolve.”
What is weak – and vulnerable — must be valued so that it isn’t expressed cataclysmically. And I believe what is true in the macro is especially capital T true in the micro, in our own selves. We explode or freeze when we don’t express our vulnerabilities. We transform the landscape and create new space when we do. This is so hard for me to remember that sometimes I have to shake up my routine and shift my perspective to get there.
A couple of months ago, I went to a small retreat with 11 people I didn’t know. When I wasn’t walking the trails by the river or napping or journaling, I was sitting in a circle with these strangers, who weren’t strangers for long, and sharing what lay both heavy and light on my heart, while listening to the same – all on the one condition that we didn’t say what we did for a living. In this space, we were evolving by embracing and expressing what was most vulnerable. And it only happened because we created the space to shift our consciousness outside of ourselves … and then to look back from that place, tenderly, at our own selves.
One day our luminary retreat leader offered us a writing exercise. “Picture yourself standing on a beach, watching a great and beautiful whale just offshore,” she said. “Now shift your perspective. Now, you are the whale in the ocean, looking at this person standing on a beach who is staring out into the ocean. What do say to her?”
If we could see our small, endearing, annoying little selves as a 90-foot Baleen whale might, would that not then widen and deepen the capacity to love ourselves, and to gather the strength to listen to our needs, even when it feels like sadness at an inconvenient and otherwise happy time ? I know that what people wrestle with during the holiday season can so often be terribly complicated and untouchably private, but I do believe it could only help.
For what it’s worth, here is what my whale said to me:
“It’s All Right.
I am 163 years old and you are 42 years old and we span the distance of 121 years and several species bloodlines and that is still nothing to the sand you are standing on, and It’s All Right.
My seas are warming and acidifying and there are distances in some of your most defining relationships and a confusion in how you want to lead the 2nd half of your life, and It’s All Right.
My numbers are dying out and I often swim hundreds of miles alone and you carry forever in you the sorrow of a child who’s lost her mother and It’s All Right.
There are times I fill my great lungs and burst out of the water, spinning the frontier of my white belly to the sun, joyful in unexpected flight. And you, in your kitchen, when no one is watching, bump close the utensil drawer with one hip and break into a little dance, arms overhead, briefly and blissfully free free free. And It’s All Right.
Because beneath the all rightness, we are both held, you and I, in the current of a deeper love. And I see you. You belong to me. I belong to you.
So breathe, tiny female human. It’s okay. It’s All Right.”
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