After the Ball was Over

There is an old poem about After The Ball, describing how the Belle of the Ball takes her appearance apart - down to the wooden leg and glass eyes, commenting on the illusion of her perfection. It always amused me as a child, and now that the wrapping paper is cleared and binned, and Christmas dinner sufficiently digested for me to move and think again, I'm left with that deflated sense of inevitability – this comes round every year, this mass of hysteria, excitement, endless food and drink and sociability, and far more packaging around everything than necessary. And now all the sales are on. Now everything we just spend money on is half price or less, and it makes me wonder how much the margin is pushed up before Christmas, if prices can be so severely slashed straight after. And why do we bother with presents on the day when it would save so much to buy them even one day late. Yes, it is about the day itself, but when I walk – or attempt to – down Oxford Street on Boxing Day, I have to wonder when we all went so insane at the prospect of a bargain, and how the hell anyone has any money left after all the pre-Christmas consumer madness. 

Scrooged

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. When everything extraneous is gone, all that’s left is the space it once took up, opened up to choices and potential. Unemcumbered is a lighter way to live. We’ve convinced ourselves of the worth of the material trappings of wealth and fame – but that’s just what they are: a trap.

We know, and at this time of year we spend a lot of money celebrating the fact, that the really important things in life aren’t material: goodwill and tolerance towards others, compassion, fellowship, peace on earth.

So to hammer home this point to ourselves, we spend months listening to endless carols playing under endless miles of tinsel around endless shops full of endless offers buying endless presents – and I sound like Scrooge.

But the point Dickens was trying to make wasn’t about Scrooge hoarding his material wealth, it was about Scrooge needing to reach out to other people, to overcome his lonely misanthropy and so find warmth and joy in other people.

I won’t pretend I don’t find the endlessness of the festive season tedious. I do. It seems to start in August and last until February, what with the after-Christmas sales and credit card hangover.  By the time we finally limp there, the day itself is a let-down – all hype, and then it’s over. So why do we put ourselves through all this? Why not just simplify it to what we repeatedly tell ourselves it’s about: people treating people like people?

Free ourselves up from the endless mall-crawl and present-buying-panic to spend some time with other people without seeing them as something to tick off our to-do lists. Isn’t that closer to what Christmas is supposed to be about?

Organiser

Maybe I’m just strange, maybe it’s because it’s pretty much my job, but I find a simple pleasure in organising. In filing. In taking piles upon piles of complete and utter chaos and sorting them all neatly into coherence. Even – who am I kidding? Especially – when that includes binning them.  I’ve had to do a lot of this lately, inputting data from Invoice A into Cost Monitor B and checking that my books still appear to balance. Or at worst, only wobble a little bit. And I’ve been wondering as I go through the whole process of ‘month end’ for the projects I’m working on: why is it so hard to do this in my personal life? I organise and file and tidy and update and monitor and co-ordinate all day – it’s what I’m paid for. Is it overload that stops me from spending the few minutes it would take to update and organise my own life?

When I get home, the last thing I want to do is more of what feels and looks like work – I’m fairly normal that way. The trouble is, my reluctance only makes the task loom larger and more impossible in my mind. After all, if it only takes me 30 minutes to transfer all the complex multi-layered information from a 6-page invoice into the relevant cost codes and categories of the equally complex and multi-layered cost monitor, then my own personal finances are more likely to take up 5 minutes. To reconcile the whole month. All of which makes me somewhat ashamed that I haven’t done all this already. 

Mind Over Matter

I have a lot of bad habits, and there are a lot of better habits I’d like to form – but tend not to, because I am a lazy little sod and it’s easier to stay in the familiar rut than put in the hard work to improve myself and my life. I’m getting better at it, though. Vastly better, and the secret is… that there isn’t one. The thing is, as trite as it sounds, AA has one major point: you can’t fix anything until you admit the problem.

Temptation is hard to resist, and I’m particularly good at rationalising caving into it. But if I take a microsecond to point out to myself that I am rationalising, I am just finding excuses to do something I know that, long-term, I don’t actually want to do, that’s a big help. Step away from the rationalising Id and let it ramble on, but don’t actually act on what it’s saying. Just breathe, and in a little while, the Id will get bored (it has the attention span of a two-year-old) and move onto the next impulse – and you won’t have given in.

If the Id doesn’t move on, try arguing with it – rationally – because measured logic will often defeat a toddler’s argument.

Our minds are powerful, persuasive and multi-layered. If we can harness that power, we can change absolutely anything we want. And that’s a staggering thought.

‘Twas The Month Before Xmas…

Looking at my calendar, I am struck by the fact there are 4 weeks until Christmas. You’d think I’d’ve noticed before, what with the advertising and the ‘special offers’ and tawdry tinsel everywhere. But for once, I have managed to stay pretty much Holidays-free so far. This is very good news for my patience. If I could make one global rule it would be to ban all xmas advertising, decorations and music until December 1^st. Because it’s all so overblown these days. I’m not religious, I’m not arguing for the Christian message to be the focus of the season, and yes, it is a nice – if somewhat misplaced – idea to have a time of year when we’re reminded to be grateful for what we have and pleasant to our fellow humans, but I don’t see why a celebration of returning hope in the depths of winter has become a consumerist orgy starting in August and running through until (with all the post-xmas sales) about March.

I’m not proposing the radical No Buying approach of Leo Babauta, just that we don’t go overbarod, into debt and generally insane about it.

I’ve been invited to join 7 Secret Santa schemes so far. I don’t see what purpose could possibly be served by me spending money on something generic for someone I don’t even know – because I know from receiving such gifts that it’ll probably just gather dust in a cupboard or be instantly re-gifted. So far, I’ve declined all invitations, and if that makes me a Scrooge, so be it. I’d rather keep a sense of perspective as to what the holiday season should really be about – gratitude, tolerance, peace and goodwill – than try to score social points by conspicuous splurging.

Energy Levels

The Law of the Conservation of Energy, as stated in the 1800s, tells us that total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed and transferred. These are the scientific facts, in our universe. Which is interestingly similar to the position of Oriental philosophy, with the concept of Chi and how it flows. According to physics, everything is made of atoms, and atoms themselves are made of charge and empty space. Charge is energy – so everything is made of energy (generally chemical potential energy, if I recall my high school science correctly). If I accept this scientific information, then it’s not really such a stretch to get to the idea of energy flowing, as in Eastern practices from martial arts to Feng Shui. The law of the Conservation of Energy lends itself to a person being able to borrow energy from her opponent to then use against them (a central principle of yin or internal martial arts such as tai chi, wing chun and chi kung).

This idea is  should enable us to manipulate the flow of energy to avoid feeling drained – if everything is energy, and the total amount of energy remains constant, and energy flows, then all we need to do is find a way to put ourselves in the way of that flow and absorb as much energy as we need to emit: as movement, as heat, as whatever form is required.

We live on borrowed energy then – all of us, all the time. 

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

I hear a lot about mindfulness these days. It seems to be the buzz-word of choice, especially around minimalism and Zen forums, but it’s still just a repackaging of ‘living in the moment’ or ‘being present,’  both of which hark back to ancient Eastern philosophies. The idea is that by focussing on our immediate environment and situation, we can slow down from the frantic rush of our lives and appreciate what we have. It’s all very well and idealistic, but the fact remains that we are creatures of time, and we have to plan for the future, as much as we try to learn from rehashing the past. It enriches our experience to have the contrast of memories, hopes, dreams and reality.

If I was truly ‘mindful’ I wouldn’t dream about the future, wouldn’t make grand plans and schemes to achieve. If we didn’t look at the past, how would we ever learn who we are, or how to deal with situations that are new to us, but not to our parents, our ancestors. In the cup of the hand, there may only be the present, which is trite enough without remembering that hands don’t make very good cups: they tend to leak, and as the water spills, we’re not holding it anymore, only its memory.

So I’ll continue, regardless of the zeitgeist pop-philosophers, to live my life in all three tenses, and live it all the more fully for that.