The holidays are already here for me as Tuesday night was the first night of Hanukkah, and with Christmas fast approaching, everyone is surrounded by reminders that it is the time of the year where joy and cheer is socially mandated. Paradoxically, with the holiday season and the end of the calendar year coinciding, everyone seems mindful of anniversaries both happy and sad and about the relentless accelerated pace of the passage of time, along with all of the all the retrospection that brings.
Losses are felt more acutely at this time of year
It is a cruel irony at this time of year, that losses are felt more acutely. One of my colleagues remarked to me last night that this is going to be her first Christmas without her father and her mother’s first Christmas without her husband. Suddenly, Christmas has become a repository of sadness for them as a result of the glaring omission from their lifetime of Christmas experiences. Because negative experiences are sticky and have a natural tendency to stay with us longer and positive experiences are slippery and ephemeral, it is very easy to allow our gaze to descend upon scarcity during the holiday season instead of ascending upwards into an appreciation of the abundance in our lives.
Well-meaning advice to focus on the positive is not really all that helpful, in and of itself, to those struggling with their own legitimate feelings of loss, disappointments and challenges. Yet, the advice is still fundamentally correct. So how do we reconcile the desire to focus on the positive with the reality that this time of year naturally leads itself to introspection and retrospection that tends, more often than not, to focus on what we are missing?
Scarcity and abundance exist together as the flip side of the same coin
I find it helpful to remember that scarcity and abundance always exist side by side as the flip side of the same coin. While what we lack, we used to have, it is also true that what we have we will one day lack. This may sound like a sadness, but really it is just the recognition that everything in this physical world is temporary so we will always be in possession of scarcity and abundance simultaneously. I really feel for my co-worker and her family’s sadness over missing their father/husband/sibling over the holidays. I only hope for them all during the holidays that they create new joyful memories together while respecting their sadness over what is missed. We can always choose to look upon the lack of what we have, or become more aware that everything that we have, we will one day lack.
“Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend.” —Sarah Ban Breathnach
The cruelty of our consciousness is its quick tendency to see the scarcity and the fact that positive effort is required to see and appreciate the abundance, especially in times of challenge and disappointment. But with a small, consistent application of effort, we can become more consciously aware of our natural tendency to spot the garden of scarcity and shift our focus to our secret garden of abdundance. If it is hard to force your mind to make that shift, just relax and remember that you have things that you will one day miss, so you are best served by appreciating the secret garden of abundance around you. Hug someone you love. Send an email or make a phone call to someone you realize you have not contacted in far too long.
But Sometimes, ironically, especially around the holidays, it is actually the abundance that we have that creates the scarcity of something else that we need: time by ourselves. And that is where fitness over the holidays comes in.
A focus on fitness during the holidays can remind us that we matter too
For a lot os us, the holidays can mean cramped quarters as we visit with or are hosting friends and family. Since Christmas in particular is for the children, the needs of us grown-ups often get, appropriately, shunted aside as the needs of the kids, family members and friends surround us at the expense of our own legitimate needs. Although this is all perfectly appropriate at the holidays — what are the holidays for if not time to reconnect with our families and friends — it can lead to an overwhelming and constant responsibility to cook, clean, shop, entertain and always be “on”. This can turn the holidays into a blur of frenzied activity. It is not inappropriate, in the midst of all the holiday busy-ness to carve out a little bit of time to focus on ourselves and our own needs and restore our perspective on the abundance that we have within us.
Fitness helps us choose to shift our gaze towards abundance
I have found that focusing on fitness is an incredibly effective way to restore some balance during the holiday season. An hour spent at the gym, doing yoga, or even going for a walk can help keep you feeling balanced over the holidays. And somehow, if what you need is some alone time, time spent on fitness seems less selfish than other solitary pursuits. If you can’t get, or don’t want alone time, then encourage people around you to go for a walk to break up the non-stop eating and drinking fest that the holidays can become.
My perspective on taking time away from my wife and kids and parents and in-laws to go to the gym or go for a run or a bike ride or a yoga class changed a lot after my diabetes diagnosis in 2015. While I used to feel somewhat guilty choosing to spend time to myself, especially because I am out of the house so much for work, when I started to get fit after getting diabetes I realized that each hour spent away from the family exercising was adding more years with them on the back end. After I realized that, I never again felt guilty for the choice to extend my quantity and quality of life by exercising.
As an added, special bonus, the systemic psychological effects of a little activity often helps us enhance our mood so it is a little bit (or a lot) easier to shunt aside the feelings of scarcity and choose to make a positive shift in our gaze towards our tidy garden of abundance.
I have, in recent years over the holidays, done a pretty poor job of shifting my gaze to my abundance, and have allowed myself to get too wrapped up in all the pressures of the holiday. I have been pretty consistent over the holidays over the past two years to maintain the focus on fitness, but I think I used it a litte too much as a refuge from the pressures of the season, and not enough as an opportunity to recharge to embrace those pressures as a welcome part of my own garden of abundance.
So these holiday thoughts are as much a reminder to myself as they are advice to anyone else. But isn’t it true that the best advice always is the advice we would be best served by following ourselves?
I wish everyone a Happy Hanukkah, a Merry Christmas and all the best for this season in health and abundance. Thank you to everyone who reads this little blog and emails me with their thoughts. I love the feedback and hope everyone has a great, fit, finish to 2017.
~~ Aaron