"I awake and find myself lonely in the vast world. After many an inebriating farewell cup, I come to my senses. The slanting moon on the wax is shaped like a crescent." -Hồ Xuân Hương
I have always liked the idea of the twelve days of Christmas. I am reluctant to take down the Christmas tree and all the decorations so painstakingly arranged, preferring to leave them up and glittering at least until Epiphany. Driving around my old neighborhood in the suburbs of Gainesville last night and enjoying the decorations still visible, I was happy to find that quite a few people seem to share the same reluctance. A perfectly green and functional Christmas tree tossed to the curb, to me is a sad sight, all the expectation and joy once surrounding the icon of our holiday season, now headed for the land fill.
Our time on this earth is so fleeting, the older I get, the more I rage against the machine we have created which seems to require that the vast majority of our waking moments be consumed by the grueling pursuit of digits to pay for widgets. Our celebrations and moments of vacation and renewal are few and far between in comparison to our hours of work and worry, not to mention the commute in between. Our moments of rest are disturbed by the constant background noise of information and drama. Ancient societies that we now consider “primitive” worked far fewer hours than their more sophisticated descendants.
What is it that drives us to press our flesh to the grindstone as it strips away the days of our lives in efforts which, now more than ever, enrich the few while barely sustaining the many? Perhaps it is the very real fear of finding ourselves adrift in a society which has replaced the cultural obligation of caring for the poor, the sick and the elderly with an institutional, governmental substitute that is more effective at making insurance and drug companies profitable than it is in providing quality care.
Perhaps it is the ascendancy of the competition paradigm. Millions of Chinese people work like insects, flogged by fears of failing to compete with the Americans. Their party bosses grow rich in the same way as our own corporate masters. Americans are told that older cultures than ours, not so intent on world domination, which work fewer hours, take more holidays, longer lunches, more breaks - and retire at a younger age – are corrupt, are decadent. Yet these “inferior” people live longer than we do and they suffer from less heart disease and cancer during their longer life spans.
All too soon my own work week will begin again. I am grateful, as I have been instructed to be, as millions of Americans who have seen their benefits diminish or disappear and who have not received a raise in years, have been instructed to be, that I still have a job in this economy. What can one person do against a planetary paradigm anyhow?
I’ll tell you what one person can do. One can choose not to participate in the seductions of a consumer culture which serve to further enslave. I can refuse to borrow money to pay for things I do not need but have been conditioned to want. I can learn to want what I already have. I can find pleasure in the myriad facets of life in a magical and remarkable world that does not depend on this thin veneer of human activity for its magic and remark-ability. I can learn to spend less than I earn and to save and invest wisely and dispassionately. I can leave my Christmas tree up until spring if I want to.
