May You Feast on the Non-Essential: A Coach's Blessing for the Holiday Season
For many, this is a season of music, of feasting and cheer: the holiday essentials. But I wonder - when it's not "the holidays," what do you consider essential? During the rest of the year, do you find yourself trying to get by without the music or cheer - without the things you may actually need?
Think of the phrase "take time to breathe." As though it were optional! As we approach what is for many an opportunity for precious downtime, I invite you to ask yourself how you can use this time not only to restore and reenergize, but to keep it going throughout the year. To help navigate the question, here are some thoughts carried over from a coaching session I had with a client this morning...
This winter, I hope you can enter the dark, find the light, and carry that spark into the rest of your year.
Even if we look at screens and drive cars, we are animals - our bodies follow certain rhythms even when our minds forget to. As the bears den up, the plants go dormant, the days darken and the light wanes, may your hearth glow and your inner light be kindled.
What do you really need in your life, now and always?
Do you need to withdraw to engage? Be alone to connect? Go into the dark to notice the light?
It's no accident so many of us celebrate with light at this time of year. Solstice, Kwanzaa, Yule, Bodhi Day, Chanukah, Christmas, Omisoka, New Year's Eve, and Chinese New Year - just to name a few - with Diwali and Dia de los Muertos and Ramadan not far off. Bonfires, strings of lights on trees and houses, luminarias, farolitos, firecrackers, candles on ofrendas, in the kinara and hanukiah, even in wreaths upon our heads. Stars, explosions of color - the wine is sparkling and even pudding is set ablaze!
May you be unproductive, unplug, waste time, laze about, lie flat, and feed yourself that rich stuff you may not savor during the rest of the year.
Maybe that's flaming Christmas pudding or latkes or black eyed peas and maybe it's poetry, drawing, or just looking out the window. And may you realize that these activities are not frivolous but essential.
A little story: As a theater maker in my early 20s, I was having one of many freakouts about what I was doing with my life and whether I was making any difference. I unburdened myself to my friend Jon Dworkin, who was then in medical school and would go on to work as an infectious disease doctor in New York City, Honolulu, and Kurdistan. I unfavorably compared my work with his literally saving lives, and I'll never forget how he responded: "I'm like a mechanic, fixing their bodies. You give them something to live for."
I was acting like a school that feels it has to cut its drama program in order to survive, ready to axe my passion for something more "practical." And what would happen if we all did that? As my cousin, the artist Maris Jones recently told me, artists so often lack support, but what would our lives look like without art for even just one day? No shows to watch, books to read or music to listen to as you stared at empty walls, for starters. What happens to us when we do the same to our selves?
As you hibernate this season, may you remember that your body cannot survive without fat. And may you get what you truly need.
Think eggnog, sooji halwa...
And if you live in the southern hemisphere, ignore everything I said about the season and hope you have a great summer.
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