It's December 27th, in years past I might be taking down Christmas trees, wrapping ornaments in newspaper and lining them up in ratty cardboard boxes. Winding lights into neat circles, and bunching tinsel into plastic bags to settle neatly underneath dust for the next 11 or so months until the sound of Christmas radio and church bells coaxes them out again. I'd pay a bunch of Girl Scouts $10 or so to take my tree away for "recycling" and make a promise to buy cookies as soon as they come back around with their order forms and sales goals. I'd be back at work and the last few holiday events of the season would be winding their way down, culminating in New Year's Eve parties and a long lazy January first before the new year begins it's eternal countdown to another holiday season. The days growing first longer and then shorter.
This year I'm sleeping in longer than I should, staying up late at night watching documentaries on Netflix, reading articles about gender differentiation and trying to wrap my brain around what the next six months of my graduate school adventure will entail. Wiling away the post Christmas days with student loan paperwork, and almost-daily erg regimes that will undoubtedly turn out to not have been enough once the term starts and rowing picks up yet again.
I have to keep reminding myself that another holiday season has come and gone. Without those annual traditions it almost doesn't feel like Christmas has come, let alone gone. Cambridge has been a ghost town since about the 20th of December. The students that are left either come from far enough away that they can't afford to go home for the holiday break, or for whatever reason they don't have anything worth going home to. Some of the science students are here to run experiments with living things like rats, beetles or cell samples that need checked on daily. But we're a small, odd group, enjoying the stark cold sunny weather and waiting for our friends to come back from where ever it is that they went to celebrate Christmas.
Holidays are always an opportunity for me to wonder what it is that causes tension and trouble. What flips a bland afternoon into an evening of fighting, screaming and hurt feelings? When do you cross that line from semi-boredom to saying and doing things that you'll regret for weeks or months to come? What turns a mildly awkward family dinner into a chance to rehash--over and over and over and over and over--bad days from years ago. The minutes turning into hours of staring at the same ugly history. A history that can't change because the past is what it is. Family get-togethers mean proving loyalty. Demonstrating that you still know what's "right" and who is "wrong." A world in which time with friends is worth so much more than time with family, because one comes with pain, the other with laughter.
From that perspective, a quiet Christmas in Cambridge was a Christmas devoid of expectation. Good or bad. There was no sickening dread in the pit of my stomach to be quenched and swallowed, and no hope to be crushed. And I come from what could widely be considered a pretty happy family. No one is dying of cancer, we've all managed to avoid substance abuse and most of us are employed. I can't imagine what a Christmas would be like if there were actual problems. Real things causing real stress.
I like to believe that every year is a new chance to make new memories. Enhance what is good, replace what's not. But bit by bit, year by year, the choices we make can change or reinforce what we expect, and maybe the key to letting change in, is to let go of those expectations. To untie the present from the past as much as one can. We can choose to be defined by what happened before, letting old wounds fester and seep into the present. Sometimes we can't help it. Pain can take years to ebb into the everyday flow of life. But it can shape us, without defining us. It can become a part of us without controlling who we are and how we live. That we were hurt does not need to become our identities.
And the chance to see the motions of life from another perspective, to take a year quietly 'off' of traditions and home, can be a chance to remember that. To remember that every day is a new chance to be not who we have always expected to be, but to be who we have always wanted to be :-)
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