Baby it's cold outside

Christmas, the most wonderful time of the year. Happiness abound, stockings filled with cheer, cookies and presents! As a child it was bar none the happiest time of the year, how could it not be for a kid. As a teen, awesome - getting loaded at Christmas and getting presents, amazing. Late teens and early 20’s – still amazing. No presents but I was really getting loaded and it was dope. Literally. Mid 20’s to the mid 30’s, better than all the years before, I was clean, in love and had a child to spoil. Those years were by far the best Christmas years ever, even above the one’s of when I was a child and getting all the spoils. Late 30’s and into the early 40’s, fucked. Like there were hours here and there where I felt that spirit, that happiness, but they were fleeting hours. All the momentum I built up over the year’s prior was gone, lost to a heartbreak. I had held on so tight to what was, it made it impossible to let go and move on. How does one make new memories, enjoy the moment if they are tied to the past. There was no compromising, no dealing, no easing into that change, it was you have it all and now you get nothing. Well not nothing, you get a few hours here and there.

I decorated the first few years after my divorce, I decorated in the hopes that I might get time with my daughter at my place. I decorated for myself, to try and get that Christmas spirit to come full circle, to try and extinguish the sadness in me. I had stockings hung, garland strung, a tree and an elf or two - all this and red bows tied with care. My home looked like something out of a Hallmark movie on the Lifetime channel with a Marth Stewart inspired charm. There was a makeshift village with lit up stores and sparkly snow, reindeers and Santa’s at every glance. And the lights! On doorways and shelves, in the tree and hanging outside the house. I would bake cookies, mass amounts of cookies and fudge and the variety I had! Traditional fudge, black and white fudge, Mexican wedding cookies, the forever loved chocolate chip, oatmeal butterscotch – I even made a cookie that had crushed up candy canes and corn flake cereal in it. Music played, I checked all the gifts off the list and then I sat there, ever so precisely wrapping each one. It was the happiest time of the year and I did all I could to share it, to give it, to enjoy it, to be encapsulated by it. I so needed to feel something, some glimmer of love and happiness and Christmas never disappointed, right?

I had latched on to something to make me happy, to someone, in those years that happiness never really came. It reminded me of when I was at the end of my using career, I had no Christmas spirit, I had no nothing. I was strung up for nights on end, malnourished and broken inside. No one desired me to be in Christmas photos with my holey jeans and greasy hair, nor did they want me at their house celebrating in orderly fashion – I knew nothing of orderly fashion. My life then was a bloody blur and I cared not. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Flag Day - not one holiday held any weight. I was dead inside and the drugs masked any residual feelings. I was so fuck’n sad, I just wanted to die. I never did enough drugs to OD, I was too chicken shit to take my own life so I twirled in the misery of my addiction. No happiness existed in those couple years, just me, misery and dope.

My attachment to this holiday might be considered unhealthy by Buddhist standards, attachment to anything by Buddhist standards is actually considered the root of suffering. Still, my desire to revel in this holiday and share it with my daughter was unmatched. We should be drinking hot coco, decorating a tree and stringing popcorn for it. We should be dawning festive attire, walking about downtown shopping for the perfect gifts. We should be baking cookies and listening to Jessica Simpson’s and Nick Lachey’s version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” – one of my favorites. But today we are not and that’s ok. My need for this in recent years past was as poetic and beautiful and it was devastating. I forever hung onto my times of happiness and not letting those times go and finding new ways to be happy. Those first few years of not having my daughter but for a couple hours here and there, having the house looking like Santa’s village exploded – there was no way I couldn’t feel like my heart had been ripped out. But I didn’t need to hold on to that for so long, my obsession with self always gave me the most pain. Sometimes it feels like it takes an insurmountable amount of spiritual centeredness to let go and over-come that which filled your heart.

Even with droplets of sadness sitting on heart today, not one decoration to be seen in my home, time with my daughter spent mostly by text or drop in’s at her work, I am happy and the spirit of Christmas is within me. It’s not as aromatic as it was when I was a kid, defiantly not “dope”, nor does it have that unexplainable feeling of when I was married and Delaiah was getting all I got at Christmas as a child. But it carries a happiness of seeing others happy, seeing the decorations in the windows of stores and the lights on the houses. I was always happy to see others smiling and loving at this time of year, but in those time’s I always had something of my own to be happy about so it made it ok to be happy for others. My happiness for others was plausible but untrue, I was happy for them cuz I was happy. It’s maddening how we range over our lives, how lessons are learned and forgotten and learned again and forgotten again and so on. It takes great spiritual consciousness to be happy for others when you don’t see yourself as having much. I mean there’s a homeless person out there that would love to have a roof over their head, but as we process our experiences it’s hard to find the gratitude for what we have.

This moment, these past couple weeks I have not been living in ego or self-centeredness, it has been truly divine I must say. Wait, let me rephrase that. I have been living in very little ego and self-centeredness, I don’t know if I will ever be enlightened enough to be free and clear of those defects. I can attribute the past couple weeks to many things, but it’s perception that tops the list. When I remove “I” from the equation I am able to see reality without ego, my perception is changed and a happiness blossom’s. I know that for most people things make them happy and if I could afford many thing’s I would buy all the things for others, yet my pockets are only so deep. I dream of winning the lottery at times and I think of all the burdens I could lift for some, squirrel away enough to live a humble life and then walk around with a roll of 100’s and give them out to strangers. I could buy reliable cars for some, houses for others or buy an apartment complex and charge minimal rent so people could save their money then move out to give someone else the opportunity to save money or pay off debt - that would tooootally be a Christmas miracle.

But alas that is not now and now is where everything is happening. Now is the moment I get to live in, be in love with if I choose to be. My occasional idea that this holiday being just two days is quite skewed. I like momentous moments, I like the gratification that comes at the crescendo – yet another defect I toil with, not living in the moment. Each moment in life is the moment, is the crescendo, is the high point. Each breath new, every step the first. When I live for what is coming or what could be I live in sadness and longing, I live in desire and attachment. When I surrender and accept, I live in harmony with the world and true peace within. I am grateful for those dark years, for giving away the decorations, for the pain and sadness, the ego and self-centeredness that created such misery. I need to trudge on occasion, I need that arduous life to find the spiritual one. For if it wasn’t for what was there would be no now.

Namaste 🙏🏻