by Charity Erickson
When I was in my early teens, I spent many December evenings lying on the floor with my head beneath our fake Christmas tree, looking up through the papery-plastic branches at the colored lights we’d woven through the ever-ever-evergreen. (My parents have had the same tree for twenty years now; it’s still going strong.) I was trying to recapture a feeling—a memory of an experience that seemed so specific and real—of transcendent wonder that I felt at some singular moment in early childhood, while lying under the Christmas tree.
Now that I know a little more about the inner-workings of nostalgia, I know that the original experience which I was trying to re-create probably never really happened. Nostalgia is funny like that. It is a feeling based on idealized memory; it is a trick of the brain in which past events are recalled as we wish they had occurred. There is a mournful aspect to nostalgia, and I don’t think it’s just because it involves longing for a time that is past and cannot be revisited; I think the gentle sadness that accompanies nostalgia has also to do with a subconscious awareness that our most beautiful memories are of things that never really happened, at least, not the way we remember them.
It seems to me that nostalgia is never more active than during the holiday season. We have a collective belief that this time of year should be special, sentimental, perfect. It makes sense, then, that our subconscious would be devoted to repairing our lackluster or outright negative holiday memories. That our brains manufacture holiday nostalgia evidences, perhaps, a psychic need to affirm the societal construct – the goodness and specialness of the holidays.
It is fascinating that nostalgia’s richer, more intense German cousin sehnsucht includes “addiction” as part of its meaning; it speaks to a yearning so powerful that it has to be filled with something, even if that something is just a place-holder. And I can’t help but wonder if the ever-inflating consumption and consumerism that takes place during the winter months have less to do with pure greed and gluttony and more to do with satisfying our desperate need to believe that transcendent moments of pure joy and wonder are able to be orchestrated or contrived—and our deep sadness at knowing they are not. It’s the sehnsucht of Christmas that pushes us to buy, to decorate, to stress out about traditions. It’s all about chasing that beautiful moment.
The fact that we have to go to other languages to find words to capture the full essence of this longing (the Japanese have a similar concept, called mono no aware) shows how uncomfortable our culture is with simply feeling these feelings. We feel like we need to fix the feelings—we need to indulge our nostalgia, to chase it and change the past—but perhaps when we do this, we miss out on the beauty of the feelings themselves. Longing is so close to hope; and in that wishful desire for the beauty of the holidays to take over and bring us to that transcendent place of wonder and joy—in that simple hope—there is something worth celebrating, even with quiet tears while lying under the Christmas tree.
Charity Erickson and her husband live and work together in the north woods of Minnesota. Check out her blog for more of her writing and follow her on Twitter @CharityJill.
You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology. If you'd like to support what we do, you can donate via the button on the right of the screen.
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| Fear the beard. |
by Ben Howard
I shaved my beard yesterday.
That may not mean a lot to you, but it means something to me. The only time I shave, or get a haircut for that matter, is when I'm in need of some kind of emotional catharsis. And lately, I've needed that kind of emotional release.
Let me explain. I'm terrified.
I'm terrified by this endeavor and how it's become such a huge part of my life.
I'm terrified by how much it has grown. I track my page views daily (which I realize is crazy narcissistic, but it's part of being a blogger), and I honestly can't believe how much the place has grown.
I'm terrified by how I feel things have matured, both in terms of other talented writers joining me and the way I can see my own writing improving.
But what I'm really terrified of are none of those things. I'm terrified of failing. The better I feel about this endeavor, the more I realize that it would hurt if it all turned south and went down in flames. Or even worse, if it just wasted away, starving until nothing was left but the shell it left behind.
But I am scared that in an attempt to stave off failure, I'll change, and that I won't like who I become. I want to bring you beauty, and humor, and spur your mind and your imagination about what it means to be live in this world, and what it means to seek after a better one.
But I also want you to like me. I want you to read my posts. I want you to say nice things about me. Sometimes these desires work together, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes I worry about which one is winning.
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| Ugh, feelings. |
Life is messy. I know it's messy, but I don't want it to be. Sometimes I pretend it's not. Sometimes I let it all show. That's why community is so useful. It's a place to let it all show.
I assume this chaotic tug-of-war is present in everyone. We battle our own emotions, desires, needs, and fears on a daily basis. Too often we seek easy answers about ourselves and others. We attempt to clarify our emotions and motivations in an attempt to explain ourselves. We attempt to uncover the motivations of others by dissecting their actions.
We assign grand narrative arcs to ourselves and those around us that look very tidy and clean and believable, but which ultimately bear little relation to the jagged, chaotic tumble of everyday life. We rarely know the whole story, even when it comes to our own interior struggles.
This is where I find the importance of community. We let people in and we let them know us, and in the process of letting them discover who we are, we attempt to know ourselves a little better.
It's scary to be that vulnerable. I'm nervous right now that you'll read this and see me as self-absorbed, or needy, and to be honest, that is who I am. I'm a chaotic mix of diverging emotions most of the time. I rarely make sense even to myself.
Through that vulnerability and through this growth within our communities, experiencing pain and joy alongside others, we learn about them and about ourselves. The discoveries we make aren't always pretty, sometimes they're quite disappointing, but they allow us to grow and develop.
These communities allow us to overcome fear and failure, insecurities and chaos, and live into a better version of ourselves and a better version of our world. Sometimes they help us to know that we just need catharsis, that we just need a release.
That's what I needed.
And that's why I shaved my beard.
Peace,
Ben
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