It was much earlier in my life that I became disenchanted with the hype surrounding christmas and new year. As much as I wanted these two days to bring a different perspective or fresh start into my life, even if it were for only those two specific 24 hour periods alone, it never happened. The reality of the day never came close to matching the expectation of the magical transformation. December 25th was just another day in the life of…as was January 1st.
Year after year.
Quite naturally, I went through a decade in my 20s of blatant cynicism during the countdown to Christmas. Initially this scroogism had waited until December 1st to manifest itself but eventually, much like the sales and decorations of the season, it crept forward on the calendar to include Thanksgiving. I rarely passed up an opportunity to expound upon the crass commercialization and gross distortion of intention that I felt had completely consumed the holidays. At least in the America I knew.
As I’ve acknowledged elsewhere, I was a pain in the ass about a lot of things. This was just one of the more predictable occasions.
Not that what I was expressing didn’t have a lot of truth in it. It did.
No, it simply that it didn’t serve a good purpose expressed in the way I chose to express it. Banging pots and pans around people who are trying to sleep rarely generates a warm response.
And so it was that I came to accept and to live in such a way that greets every day as NEW. New as in fresh. New as in unknown. New as in familiar but not identical. A day in a life that was recognizable and yet still developing. A day that would forever be unpredictable without being chaotic because the centering element was in place.
A self awakened to self.
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