As the song goes, “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”
And what does this mean for most people? More time spent with immediate family, distant relatives, and family friends. Holiday parties. The kids are on winter break.
For many of us, the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s is a time of maximum communal saturation: there is no other time in the year when we have this much contact with this many people.
Some people love it, some people hate it, and most people are presumably somewhere in the middle:
Yes, it can be a hassle,
No, it’s not always comfortable making smalltalk with people I otherwise never talk to,
But I wouldn’t really have it any other way.
And why not? Because there’s deliberate focus on togetherness, on gift giving, on ritual, on culture, and, actually, on happiness.
We’re exhorted, endlessly, ad nauseum, to be cheerful. I think this is good advice!
As someone who can tend excessively toward seriousness (I know this comes as a shock to many of you), I like that Christmas songs, and Christmas movies, are so insufferably upbeat. I like that they back you into a corner and force you to participate, to laugh and smile, and to see the good in yourself and others.
And, I like it because it works. Being asked, cheerfully, to cheer up, doing nice things for people who are also doing nice things for you – where’s the problem?
However, let’s just admit it:
it’s unsustainable.
It’s overkill.
It does stress people out.
We overeat, overspend, and often overly compare ourselves to others and feel as though we fall short of some abstracted ideal that very few people actually embody. People who expect the holidays to somehow make the rest of the year “worth it,” or to redeem their relationships, are a bit sad and naive.
The problems with the holidays come from excess, and the excess comes from its scarcity: the year culminates in these few days, and it’s inexcusable to squander it, the same way that it’s inexcusable to squander the summer.
But there’s a little glimmer of what might be possible for us if we were to make life feel a bit more special a bit more often.
With that in mind, we arrive at our subject for today:
How to better participate in your relationships and your culture year round.
How to extract the best of what “The Holidays” foist upon us, and consume that essence in digestible doses all year round.
Before I lay things out in prosaic detail, mostly in the form of dry instructions, a word of clarification about exactly what we’re after and why.
All of this, all the writing I do here, is about being a better person. A more happy, principled, purposeful person. I share these articles so that you might do what I do: create more structures in your life that tilt you in the direction of realizing your potential, and of truly becoming the person you, your parents, and your society hoped you’d grow up to be.
This is always and only about becoming someone the world would be proud of producing. That means cynicism cannot be tolerated. It means shallowness cannot be tolerated. It means you do things, not just talk about them as if you do. It means parting with your selfishness, with your facades, with your compensatory bravado, and committing yourself to goodness with the sincerity of a child.
All of this is to bring you to a place where you can say “peace on Earth, and goodwill toward men,” unironically, and have that mean something. We cultivate physical strength, intellectual rigor, and moral courage, so that we might resist the entropic forces of time, the death by a thousand cuts that see most people slide into complacency, mediocrity, and willful blindness. We do this so that we might one day be called good, and perhaps even remind others by our example that goodness is real, and goodness matters.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about how to use the coming year to more fully participate in our relationships and our society.
Part One: understanding and appreciating others.
The following exercise comes from The How of Happiness, by Sonja Lyubomirsky, with some minor modifications by me. Specifically, I’ve just expanded it into a 12 month program. Here it is.
Make a list of twelve people in your life. If you’re in a relationship, your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife should be at the top. Then your parents, siblings, close friends, and so on. Twelve people who matter to you.
On a sheet of paper or a digital document, create a list going from January to December. Assign one name to each month.
Under each name, create a four item list, labeled, respectively,
Positive attributes
Positive memories
Charitable explanation
Shared values/beliefs/goals
So, here’s how it works. For each month, spend a little time once a week, really no more than 30 minutes, say, on a Sunday evening, writing about the important people in your life.
For week one, as the prompt suggests, just list off the things you like about this person. It could be anything, and nothing is too small or too private to write down. Nobody sees this but you.
For week two, recount a happy memory of this person. Again, this is fairly straightforward. Nothing fancy here, and there’s no trick to it. The trick is to actually do it, not just think about doing it and then talking as if you’ve done it (that’s a recurring theme).
Week three is the more difficult exercise. Recall a time when this person disappointed you, and make the most robust defense you possibly can for their actions. If this individual was on trial for this incident, think of yourself as the defense attorney, whose words are making all the difference. Really put yourself in someone else’s shoes, perspective, motives, and so on. Without distorting the truth one iota, offer a defense.
Week four is easier: talk about what you have in common. Avoid petty or superficial things. Talk about values, aspirations, and beliefs. In what ways does this person also have a bit of what makes you a special and worthwhile person?
The next month, repeat these steps for the next person on your list. And so on, until, by the year’s end, you’ve done these writing exercises for the twelve most important people in your life.
The purpose of this exercise is to make you more in touch with the humanity and the admirable qualities of the people in your life. What makes them lovable, valuable, and memorable to you.
You don’t need to inform any of them that you’ve been writing about them, but if doing so makes you want to call, or make plans, or do something nice for them, obviously, do so!
Something that has served me very well has been the decision to give more of myself to what is already present in my life. Not to seek newer and better but to give newer and better energy to what is already present. To observe more closely, to engage more deeply, to make more time, and to express more appreciation.
You will only be happier with yourself and your life if you invest this kind of good thoughtful energy into your existing relationships. Keep a journal as you go through this process, and consider sharing your results in the form of a social media post or newsletter like this one.
Step Two: culture matters.
Just as there’s more to being social than social media, there’s more to culture, to the arts, than what you’re probably streaming over Netflix and Spotify.
Let’s think back to our introductory discussion about Christmas. When I think of culture in that context, I think of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. I think of artistic works that were labored over by tortured intellectuals with drinking problems, repressed sexual identity issues, terrible childhoods, and so on. You know, the formula for greatness.
Jokes aside, major holidays are also times when we are somewhat compelled to participate in culture: in things many find dry, but are deeply enriching if you can get over the aspects of it that are removed from our contemporary sensibilities.
I’ll confess a bit of my own personal bias: in my years of listening and reading, I’ve found that I very much resonate with things that come from the 19th century, or were raised on the works of the 19th century. Literature, poetry, classical music, nonfiction – I don’t wish to go back to another time, but most of what is truly dear to me, that I probably wouldn’t share with just anybody, was made in the hundred years spanning 1870-1970, give or take.
Why do I tell you this? Because, for this next exercise, I’m going to suggest that you participate in some aspects of culture that might be closer to my interests than yours. These activities occur once per month, so I’m going to ask you to suspend disbelief, withhold judgment, and keep an open mind. Try to be curious. If nobody showed up in your life to make fine art, drama, and orchestral music cool in your eyes, do allow me to do so now.
Here’s what I’m asking you to do:
Do a Google search for the best three art galleries in [name of your city]. Write them down. Do a Google search for the best three museums in [name of your city]. Find the largest theater in your city and bookmark their calendar in your web browser. Ditto for the local symphony. Once per month, visit these places in the following schedule:
Art galleries: January, May, September
Museums: February, June, October
Theatrical productions: March, July, November
Symphonic performances: April, August, December
Find someone you know who loves this sort of thing, and invite them with you. Or go alone. But go. You will be surprised how thought provoking this sort of thing actually is. As cliched as it might sound, going to places like these will expand your horizons. It puts you in touch with cultural traditions, with schools of thought, and with crafts that have been with us for a relatively long time. What you’re seeing when you go to galleries, museums, theaters, and symphony halls are the things that make Western civilization special, that not everybody has, and which have not been around for all of human history: the flowering of the human intellect and its creative, expressive capacity to a level of great artistry and mastery.
For those of you who are looking for a way to inject more meaning, more depth, and more appreciative contemplation into your life, the two programs outlined above represent a formulaic approach guaranteed to produce results. This might just be the thing you’re looking for. Or, even if you wouldn’t say anything is missing from your life, you could view these programs as a kind of fun experiment, just to see what happens.
As always, the results come to the doer, not to the non doer. Good luck.
Thank you for reading, talk to you soon.
Jas
Make Beautiful Choices 