Post-Holiday Calm Cause for Celebration
On the morning after New Year's Eve, unlike any other day of the year, a ghosttown eeriness blankets this otherwise bustling metropolis like a blizzard. The cause? Like clockwork, most of us just finished running, with all our might, the holiday marathon -- that month-long stretch of unrestrained and remorseless consumption and conviviality extending from Thanksgiving to New Year's Eve. And now, we're spent and blue. The joyful outer and internal noises of 30 days or so -- banquets, sing-a-longs, silver bells, elation, unconditional love for all humanity -- have become a fainter-by-the-hour echo, soon to be drowned out by the gnawing of our usual preoccupations, or such distractions as a daily regimen of blaring T.V. or stereo. Before long, all that will remain of the soaring holiday spirit are twinging memories, long-term debt, excess weight, gifts prematurely old and forgotten and the haunting silence of winter. In our solitude, one question reasserts itself to no end: what will we do now in the thick of winter? That spring is around the corner is no consolation. Nothing exhilarates us like the holiday season. What to do? Embrace winter's silence with all the gusto that we did the festivities. Unfortunately, winter's silence is something we city folks know almost exclusively in contrast to the noisy merrymaking of the holidays, rather than on its own merits. We look down on winter's silence as the opposite of something good, a vacuum, unnatural. But relatively few phenomena are as truly natural as the silence of the winter. That we can't perceive this goes to show the depth of our disconnectedness from Nature and, thus, our own unnaturalness. In the same way that it's time for some plants and animals to go underground, the silence of the winter is a suitable occasion for us, as aspects of Nature, to go inward. Don't think of this journey as a substantial curtailment of our time in public, which is virtually impossible anyway because we all must sustain ourselves and our dependents. Throughout this season, it's feasible to set aside part of each day to reflect on winter's austerity and all it implies for our spiritual evolution. After a prolonged spell of feasting, nothing is more appropriate than fasting. Or better yet, solitude -- fasting from commotion -- is a most fitting sequel to extensive revelry. Not only do our stomach and ears, our body and spirit, always seek to tell us as much. So does the winter. Thick afros of leaves and dense patches of flowers give way to naked branches and desolate parcels. How come? Because everything must come to an end so that there can be a new beginning. Growth can't take place without death. Bounty is impossible without vacancy. Winter's silence gives us an opportunity, charged with the power of the Earth's own life force, to go one-on-one with ourselves with fewer distractions, so that we can surrender, as if they were dead leaves and petals, those elements of body, mind, and spirit that obstruct the attainment of true joy. And true joy isn't a feeling that is born and dies with the noise of the holiday season. It's spiritual awarenesses that are born from solitude and which quietly thrive within us all year round. Happy winter! John Dallas is founder of the Bronx Campaign for Peace and Quiet. Sound Advice is copyrighted by John Dallas and cannot be reprinted without his permission. Recent Sound Advice Columns include:
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