Entertaining the Christmas Ghosts.
This time of year can hold so much in expectation for so many people. There is a pressure for this time to be the ‘perfect’ day so often many of us fall short of that expectation. We spend the first part of the season preparing for the one day in the future that is loaded with pressure and expectation to be perfect. We may watch festive films where there is always a ‘happily ever after’, listen to the ever present thrum of Christmas music that suggests instant jollity, wonderful, snowy perfection, or see the lives of those on social media who are only often represented in the perfect snippets of their lives, that lead the rest of us into feeling inadequate or disappointed. In a strange dissonance with this preparation and focus on this one special day in the future we are also holding the past very much in view. Christmas day can be a day that is full of cultural, familial or personal ritual and pressure. Where the past dictates how we ‘should’ do today, where there are indeed great expectations routed in past memories, often distorted and improved over time.
Accompanying these expectations from our festive histories is another problem that is also hidden from view. We all have a different perspective of our histories. So my expectations may differ from yours and yours from others in your family and so on. When we all have such different ideas and expectations there is no surprise that we may fall short and fall out as we are all looking at different pictures and asserting that our picture is the right one
After the ‘big day’, the second part of the season can become a strange no-mans land where time temporarily stops still as we again await a new future in the New Year. A liminal time, betwixt and between, neither here, nor there.
We make it to New Years Eve - another night of ritual and expectations: a night to celebrate the past year or alternatively let it go, whilst we imagine and drink to a new year of hope, dreams and endless possibilities. Another night where we are in the past and the future at the same time, another liminal moment; another moment loaded with expectation, history, ritual and a sense of pressure.
When I consider this time of year I don’t think there is another season or holiday that is so loaded with the past memories, present expectations and future promises. This in itself is enough to derail us from remaining present and grounded; it can send us off into a spiral of pressure, ‘shoulds’ and ultimately a sense of disconnection and disappointment. The ghosts of Christmases past, present and future really do step up and haunt us on a level that is often subconscious, yet fills us with a deep and uneasy sense of dread that appears masked by the ubiquitous festive requirements to be jolly, peaceful and loving to all people on earth.
What also strikes me about this time is how much of it is about our thinking. We are so involved in planning the future with the past in mind that we cannot be present. And it is when we are not present that we are actually missing the moment of what it is really like right now. Just now, not ‘now compared to how it used to be’ or how ‘it should be’, not ‘now’ because I need to get this done to make sure that the future is ok. Just ‘now’, these minutes, these moments, this VERY precious time.
The truth is, the only thing that takes us out of the now is our thinking, where our own personal Jacob Marley presents us with the ghosts of Christmas past and Christmas yet to come. If we really stop for a moment we will see that it is not Christmas that is stressful/pressured/disappointing - it is our THINKING about Christmas, our entertaining of those ghosts. When we remember that it is not the world that we are experiencing but our thinking ABOUT the world then we can really start to get some traction on changing that experience, or just experiencing it differently.
If you really want to give yourself a present this festive season then remember that being present is about being here and now; anything else is our THINKING about the past or the future, it is the ghosts of the past and the future, it is not real, it is mere thought. Ask yourself, ‘what am I thinking in this moment right now? What is influencing how I am feeling in this moment?’ And then you have a CHOICE; you can entertain those ghosts or you can ask them to leave quietly and peacefully and that, that is the real gift, that is the present that we can really rejoice in.