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Just over a year ago, my mother died. It was a few months after my second baby was born and a month before Christmas. She was the last in the generation above me, and this fact reordered things in ways that are only just revealing themselves.
This time last year, I was still unravelling – months of hospitals, grief and the unmanageable weight of suffering pressing into my postpartum body.
Roshi Joan Halifax, a Buddhist teacher, once said that grief, particularly that for a parent, scours the heart. The life I once had was disintegrating. Yet what I found at the bottom was not pessimism or despair but rather a softening. A welcome and changing sense of who I was in the world.
The late psychologist James Hillman called this kind of season the process of growing down – sinking deep into the roots of things, relaxing into the life we are given, not the one we imagined.
In my growing down, what once felt urgent no longer felt compelling. I stopped fretting over the small stuff and I started to notice that the present carried all sorts of offerings I had been too distracted to savour. It felt like a kind of effortless mindfulness, a natural consequence of a direct encounter with impermanence.
Gone are the years of racing from shop to shop, collecting toys, vouchers, last-minute gifts and those very particular treats for a new year’s party. I still do those things, of course, but more as a dawdle. And I catch myself muttering, “Who cares about lunch! To hell with gifts.”
Don’t get me wrong, I look back on those frenzied preparations with fondness and I don’t rule out their return. My mother spent her whole working life in retail and when I was a child department stores felt magical, full of possibility and aliveness.
But this year I don’t feel the need to curate my holidays into an “experience”, an “event” or even something special. Instead I find myself open to what greets me through the senses – taste, touch, sight, scent – and through memory and imagination. All freely given and undemanding in their nature.
I remember the muggy Australian summer air as I make Turkish coffee in my mother’s kitchen, stirring heaped sugar into her tiny copper pot. The quiet of early morning streets. The magpie’s call. My partner thumbing through records, knowing he is about to choose Paul Kelly. My kids’ thrill at the resident Christmas elf, their squeals of rapture.
It seems my centre of gravity has shifted. The holidays are no longer something to construct but something to receive.
The Buddha taught that it is grasping that leads to suffering and that meeting things as they are leads to spaciousness, room to breathe. In Buddhist thought, when grasping falls away the world takes on greater clarity and vividness.
The middle way is a guide here. It invites balance and cautions against the extremes – the overindulgence of December or the punitive approach to new year resolutions. It also warns against rigid either/or thinking.
So we approach our holidays tenderly, not overindulging and not denying ourselves necessary and small delights. And these small delights are unfolding right now if we care to look.
As the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield explains, this is a path “of balance and care, where the heart’s natural awareness and practical compassion can grow. Through this, we become gracious and free.”
Of course, for many, the period after Christmas can be stressful, painful or overwhelming. And choosing to pause is not available to everyone; the holidays can easily be overshadowed by financial stress, caring responsibilities or sheer exhaustion. I don’t mean to romanticise very real moments of suffering.
But this receptive awareness can hold what is difficult as well as what is sublime. Thich Nhat Hanh said the most precious gift we can offer – to ourselves and others – is presence itself. And sometimes it takes difficulty, held with tenderness, to finally notice what has been in front of us all along.
I have never related to the idea that life is a gift but maybe I was missing something crucial. Perhaps it is not one grand present tied in a bow but rather a series of small gifts being offered continually, ordinary yet beautiful in their ephemerality and particularity.
I often imagine this is what Derek Walcott summons in the title of his poem Love after Love which speaks to the moment we stop turning away from life and its unexpected splendour. He writes:
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat …
The poem ends: “Sit. Feast on your life.”
May it be so for you in these suspended, in-between days.
