For many, holidays mark a time for family, food, warmth, conversation, celebration, and abundance. For many if not more of us, they are tinged with dissatisfaction or irritability if not profound grief, outright panic, or downright depression.
Loss and loneliness can feel unbearable.
Whether occurring in some form this holiday season or some time ago... Whether this is your first or tenth year without partner, child, parent, friend, sibling, pet, job, home, or health... It can be hard to feel grateful, to make superficial or meaningful conversation, to be present with the absence of someone or something you really needed or loved.
Holiday speed and real or imagined pressures are also a biggie.
Chronic anxiety does not lessen with crowded malls and restaurants, high gift giving or receiving expectations, woefully easy-to-incur online shopping debt, conversations about president-elects, or excessive alcohol/sugar intake and sleeplessness. It can be hard to relax, to feel heard or seen or anonymous enough, to connect authentically and appreciatively with ourselves, let alone each other.
So here’s to being kind...
To yourself if you're having a hard time or know you will in the coming weeks. To others if you're ok, and regardless of why they may be having a hard time.
Find an environment, make an environment, BE an environment, wherein some retreat from the bustle and tension can unconditionally be had and kindness — just the smallest most meaningful gestures and things — can be mutually felt and offered.
Conditions That Make For Workable Holidays
Because holidays can exacerbate mindlessness, know how you feel. Would you drive across the country, clueless in an overheated car with soft tires and no oil? If you can put effort into knowing your vehicle, please put effort into knowing your human self. Even if you can't rest or eat or exercise or cry when you want to, please know all the same that you are indeed tired, hungry, restless, or sad. I can't emphasize enough how much potential is catalyzed and how many possibilities emerge for self-care when we simply know -- when we don't argue with -- how we feel.
Because holidays can exacerbate impatience and control in relationships, don't know how others feel. If your attempts to figure other people out leaves you feeling exhausted from the dashed expectations that result from trying too hard to anticipate/manipulate the private world of another's experience, just stop trying so hard to know. Hands off! Trade the stress of mental chess and hopes/fears around peoples' thoughts, feelings, or intentions for the daring gracious business of asking how they are, letting them talk, and learning something about them that you could've have guessed to be so.
Holidays can stir up grief, so grieve intentionally. If you're feeling a current, recent, or old loss, please know and honor that. Set aside time and space to just sit down and pay homage to the missing person or relationship. Your grief is a testament to your caring and courageous investment, no matter how it ended. Without a nod to your grief, your "inner compass" -- designed to lead you to future relationships that would be sweetly relevant to your needs and capabilities -- is busted. Tears are cleansing, painful memories are clarifying, and space/time given to these is profoundly restorative.
Holidays can stir up seriousness, so laugh intentionally. Go through the motions of finding something stupid, something silly, something pointless, something completely disconnected to the demands you feel the holidays are making on you, and watch/read/say/do/pursue it. Detach from the "important" things you're doing -- seriously even the most excellent generous things you're doing -- in order to aerate your view. Your good works will be even better with lightness.
Holidays can pressure us to prioritize, so go ahead and do that. Like a diamond that needed more crushing to shine, let any extremes of this holiday season meet with your determination to radiate whatever wattage you've got. Take yourself out of the dark for a minute, out of the vice grip of your well-intentioned but too-intense schedule and claustrophobic to-do list. Sit, breathe, speak sparely and move slowly, make soft and sustained eye contact. Linger, emanate, be. Then, in that space, contemplate what's important, and act on it.