Monday December 27, 2004 – Christmas Blues

Monday December 27, 2004 – Christmas Blues

I ran on Sunday, the first time since Christmas Eve. It was therapeutic after two days of being cooped up in a house celebrating the holidays. You would think that Christmas would be a happy season, but for most people—no I believe for every one of us—it’s a time of extreme stress, the antithesis of the most wonderful time of the year. Every memory I have of Christmas has something in it that bears witness to this contention. At least, I am confident in making this claim of my experience with the holiday

The holiday comes as the days in the northern hemisphere have just about reached their shortest hours of daylight, the winter solstice. In Northern California, where I live, you can see the sun hanging low on the horizon as it makes it journey across the sky each day—I know that it is the earth that is turning and rotating round the sun and it’s the earth’s axis orientation that is causing the sun’s position in the sky, but the result is the same in my emotional makeup: I feel depressed.

When I was younger I believed that the cause of my depression was my ignorance: of myself, of the physical world around me that was influencing my moods, of the metaphysical universe that influenced us… However, now that I’ve gotten older and have explored myself, the physical, and metaphysical, the same melancholy afflicts me, though I understand it better now than I did as a youth. The sense of despair that confounds us, has to do with the passage of time. We each have a timer that defines our lifespan. Each passing year marked by the coming of Christmas and the arrival of New Year decrements the timer. We each hear that imperceptible click as the tolling of a bell that heralds the next step toward our inevitable oblivion.

The end does not concern me as I’m resigned to my fate of passing into the next passage that is the journey of life. The Greeks believed you traveled across the river Styx into the land of Hades. Catholisism, which is the religious denomination I’m most comfortable being labeled, believe in purgatory: the step between your earthly existence and heaven and the place likely for most Catholics unable to live the devote life needed for immediate entry into heaven. I have known a few who would qualify for bypassing purgatory and gaining immediate entrance to heaven. And there are probably some popes who would qualify for the opposite destination, hell, based on their behavior on earth. I don’t know what awaits me beyond life, but it’s just another transition that each of us must make and there is no escaping it. In some ways it is the one sure thing we know will happen in life and in this sense we must approach it the same way we approach all other inevitabilities that confront us: the draft that faced me as a young man, school that I was forced to attend beginning at age five and ending at seventeen, every order that the military issued to my father and me when we were both on active duty. We must walk through the door and see what awaits us on the other side assuming that it’s going to be worse than what we left.

But, the season drawing our attention to the fast approaching moment of final passage—at 59 I’m closer than the nearly three generations behind me—is not the only cause of dejection that the season brings on. Another reason for woe is the realization of what you’ve not yet done. How many dreams have I had that I’ve failed to realize? Many of them I’ve reconciled myself that I’m not equipped to realize even if I had put all my effort into it. When I started running twenty-five years ago, I believed that I could work myself into condition that would allow me to compete in a marathon. I can’t tell you the number of times far more gifted athletics have dispelled me of that notion. I have since resigned myself that if I can live to be a 100 and I can still run the distance I run today, then perhaps I’ll be able to outrun all of my peers unless some faster fool has the same ambition.

Running is a matter of genetic make-up. Talented athletics as well as artists, have a gift, a physical skill superior to most all of their contemporaries. I have always hoped that, though I lacked the physical attributes of some, perhaps I have other abilities that over time could be trained and refined to produce something lasting. I’m now of a mind that I came into the world with a set of deficiencies as well as assets. My assets are what I’ve exploited to earn my daily bread. My deficiencies have impeded my efforts to do all the other tasks I had set myself to do as a ninth grade student at Austin High School in El Paso, Texas. Nevertheless, I continue plodding along year after year ever hopeful.