The holidays are always so stressful. Because this? And what can be done to ease the great stress caused by our holidays? I’m going to tell you.
The design of each holiday season is about the scheduled re-emergence of hope. They are trying to make you reconsider hope and give it another chance.
Some hopes are intentionally built into the holiday season. The hope that we can crown love over hate, tolerance over xenophobia, compassion over cynicism, giving over envy, altruism over greed.
Yes Yes Yes. I know. Blah blah blah.
But there are miracles
Every year the holidays are designed to purposefully remind us that miracles do happen, not often, but sometimes. To remind us that we can have hope and we can believe again, and most importantly that we ourselves can start over. We can hope that we can be forgiven for our mistakes. We can only hope that the world will finally open its big arms to us.
Above all, we can hope that hitting the Big Reset button and starting over will make us feel new again. What makes this season so stressful is that we need that last bit of hope so badly to hit the Big Reset Button.
- We hope that bad patterns in our lives will smooth out, that our wrong turns will correct themselves, and that past hurts will miraculously disappear.
- We so hope that cultivating our gratitude at Thanksgiving can keep us from dwelling on our many disappointments of the year.
- We hope so much that love at Christmas will spread abundantly for us, and without any pressure. We hope so much that the singing of the familiar and beautiful music of the time will finally unite us as one people. We hope so much that the gifts we give and receive will drown out the despair.
- We hope so much that our good food fills more than our bellies, fills us all with a good mood.
- We so hope that being together will create in us real goodwill towards all.
But fear keeps us from hoping
Just like our fear of not hooking the brass ring of the carousel, we fear that the season will turn back and that the Big Reset Button itself will be an illusion, that the miracle of hope was just a big story. made. Our fears close our hope. And that Big Reset button disappears into the fog.
We see horrific crimes of religious intolerance and so we feel justified in being intolerant too, justified in entering this age gripped by primal fears for our own safety. Fear makes us enter the holidays with our hearts clenched on ice. And so we know hope isn’t real and the gifts we receive won’t melt our frozen hearts, the gifts we give leave us hollow and empty.
- We fear that they won’t love us and, even worse, that we won’t be able to love.
- We fear that our lives have no real meaning, that there is no big reset button, that our only solution, after cleaning up the remains of the false celebration, is to retreat to a cynical place, girdled by disappointment, hardening our hearts. suffering of others.
- We fear becoming Scrooge.
What can be done?
I once heard the Dalai Lama say that our only moral obligation is to increase compassion around us. If you look closely, all major religious traditions carry the same message of love, compassion and forgiveness. So here’s my advice. Take some time for yourself this holiday season. Do two things:
- Make a list of all the people you care about in this world. Ask yourself, “What is one thing I can do to make each of these people feel more loved right now?” Then do all those things on your list.
- Consider the new path you will now take. Write down how this new route will be different from the route you are currently on. And that really hits the Big Reset button.
Make it so that next year you can look back and say, “That was the year my life changed forever because that year I finally hit the Big Reset Button. That year I really started to love.”
