Cheer up

Sunday the 21st is the solstice — the shortest day and longest night of the year. Then the days start getting longer, but slowly — about three seconds a day at first, and accelerating in such tiny increments the days don’t start feeling longer for weeks. And for even more weeks, the weather is mostly cold and dismal. Many of us want to crawl into bed and sleep until spring, like bears in beds with blankets. 

Yet, this is the holiday season when we’re expected to be full of joy and busy baking cookies, even when the rest of the world sometimes seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. Google AI explains: 

"Going to hell in a handbasket" is an idiom meaning a situation is rapidly deteriorating, heading for disaster, or getting out of control, not a literal religious event. The phrase suggests a quick, easy, and inevitable descent into ruin, with origins debated but possibly linked to crude 18th-century imagery of carrying heads in baskets, mining baskets, or general alliteration.” 

This AI definition is an odd bit of writing; it’s almost certainly the first time "heads in baskets" and "alliteration" have appeared in the same sentence. Still, haven’t a lot of us always wondered why a handbasket would be the chosen literary conveyance for a trip to hell? 

AI’s main flaw here is describing the trip to hell as quick and easy. All of the sin and suffering of today’s world is overwhelming, immeasurably sad, and very slow in its descent to doom. 

Dark and dismal days, wars, murder on the high seas, climate change, economic turmoil, mass shootings and mass deportations ... and all that’s possibly just the warm-up for next year’s woe. 

Close to home there are other downers that pierce our hearts: expectations that can’t be met, vows that should not have been taken, injuries slow to heal, children or parents gone astray, payments too long overdue. 

All this is a potent recipe for an outbreak of holiday depression, like food poisoning for the soul. 

For all of these miseries, both global and local, major and minor, the natural world provides mitigation.  

Gazing at the tops of fir trees on the horizon is not a cure, but it’s a comfort. They are at peace, doing what they do and being what they are. They invite us to stop for a moment, and open our eyes wider. 

In this mostly wet, gray and stormy week, there have been brief sunny spells with intensely blue sky. In the sunlight, patches of green grass caught and held shimmering raindrops. Through a window, those episodes of sunlight even brightened an indoor room and, if you let it, the inside of a human. 

It’s the “letting it in” that’s crucial. It’s one of the oddest features of modern life that so many people live in a natural world they barely see. Calling it “mother nature” doesn’t mean it’s revered; it means it’s taken for granted, in the way small children regard their mothers. 

The power of nature to cheer us up is expressed in art of all kinds, and in store-bought bouquets, jewelry, fabrics and knickknacks with plant or animal images. That all life inspires art is obvious; what’s perhaps less obvious is that it’s the living original that inspires us most deeply. 

Even in these, our literal darkest hours, take the time to truly see the sky, trees, grass, birds, and colorful flocks of our fellow Homo sapiens. This is the antidote to soul poisoning that can restore our equilibrium and remind us that a turn towards the better is always possible, and always worth hoping for and working towards. 

 A good Irish poem helps too: 

 'Sometimes' 
 
Sometimes things don’t go, after all, 
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel 
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail. 
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well. 
 
A people sometimes will step back from war, 
elect an honest man, decide they care 
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor. 
Some men become what they were born for. 
 
Sometimes our best intentions do not go 
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to. 
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow 
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you. 

- Sheenagh Pugh