Christmas can be excruciating. All this talk of love and family throws heartache, loss and loneliness into relief. A woman I used to know killed herself this week, from sheer isolation it seems. In German it’s called self-murder.
It happens sometimes that the people we love are not within reach, or they have died, or we are separated by sheer human awfulness. Sometimes you just haven’t met them yet and can’t be sure they are real. This year I feel bloody lucky to be living in a brimming household, spending the holiday with people I love and where trust is rebuilding. Other times I’ve been separated from my family for geographical and also more graphic reasons and there was one Christmas I spent alone entirely, in a deep sharp almost unendurable pain. You know that special holiday feeling: that you are shut out from some cosy universal nesting time all framed in glowing windows, everyone else has a family to come home to, a loved one to choose for, trusted friends to cook for and visit and call. I wish there was a sure way of dispelling this treacherous fantasy. I wish I had a way of reaching those who suffer this season, including my former self, to ask them to hold on, to try to let the joy emerge again.
Because it will. I remember seasons in my life when I asked myself, can you die of loneliness, and heard the answer in my heart: yes – yes, you can. I’m so grateful I survived the unsurvivable times. I feel exhausted but I want to embrace life, its torment and its sweet. The perpetual leisure and the frenzy of modernity, these new tools that can take us further into life or distance us from each other. Maybe as a race we are learning in tiny, clunking, incremental steps to please stop injuring each other, to stop neglecting and ignoring, to welcome one another to the day and to embrace the golden joys of solitude. I hope we all keep on quietly learning one another’s languages. Like shade on a hot day I long for peace. In myself, and the quivering peace of many hearts. All of our hearts have struggled and been tormented. Yet here we all are. Merry Christmas to all our strange golden stained souls. And I wish for a wonderful year. A turning point. A gateway to a liveable, lovable future. A freshness that learns from old wisdoms, particularly the still-most-human communities in remnant rainforests and on deserts who have most to teach. Between the future and the past: a door.
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