There are times when it seems life has run out of steam. The space between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is one of them.
**********
It’s the week after Christmas, or ‘holiday’ if you’re part of the crowd of alchemists that mix Christmas with Visa and come up with a concoction called Santa. However the season is called, the last week in the year seems to be a peaceful one.
The frenzy is over, the extended family has vanished, the busted budgets take a breather and the returns are yet to hit UPS. The perfect evergreen is casting forth its shriveled needles and is ready for the chipper. You sort of feel the same way; plus, the kitchen is closed.
Fading wreaths and malfunctioning tree lights say it clearly…another Christmas has come and gone; another year has run its course. Yes, the turmoil of cleanup lies ahead. Still, we shrug it off and enjoy the peace that Christmas promises.
The ‘tween week offers opportunity for reflection, even if there is a mild but lingering anxiety about the unfinished details cluttering our desks. The very thought can spoil the intervening reverie. But for the moment, we erase all negative thoughts and wish for everyone tidings of peace and joy. Even for Democrats.
This short lull in life is sort of like half-time in a football game. The scoreboard reveals what has happened, but it yields no clue of what’s to come. Such is the future. So we settle into an easy chair and savor the break from the storm. The next one can wait.
Business is mostly on the back burner. It’s busy trying to figure out its own scoreboard. I sit back in my chair in no rush and pass the time with hot tea while reading Christmas cards. They’re loaded with family biographies and smiling photographs of people I can’t recognize. Then I flip through a book of poetry by T. S. Eliot.
Most people nowadays don’t appreciate poetry. It’s a wonderful career choice if obscurity and poverty are the goals. But it can’t compete with politics and preaching for pure stage effect. Poets for the most part are morose, over-educated and unwashed folks with bad hair and a strange way of speaking. But at least Eliot’s fresh breath goes against convention.
Lines from “The Hollow Men” catch my attention. In a mystical way they give meaning to this week’s intervening space of time. His words stretch to grasp the space between dreams and reality, between now and later.:
“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow.”
– From “The Hollow Men”
Strange lines to describe a paralysis of action. But when considered in the context of this waning week of the year, maybe it’s the poet’s way of simply saying, “Take a break and breathe.”
At midnight a few days hence History will add the year 2018 to its scoreboard of what has been. It will offer no clue of what is to be. In the interspace of a millisecond the Shadow will fall, but only temporarily. The old will pass, the new will begin, and everyone will get another chance for a second wind.
A line from one of Wendell Berry’s poems says it plainly:
“I greet you at the beginning; for we are either beginning or we are dead.”
What 2019 holds for us is a mystery. But to the poet in us all, life is a strange, mystical romance if only we’re willing to embrace it.
Happy New Year. Live big.
Bud Hearn
December 28, 2018