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.