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Contributed by Barbara Taylor
As we near the end of the annual Gregorian calendar we enter many celebrations that span cultural and religious lines: Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, and Winter Solstice to name a few. While these celebrations differ in their history and traditions there is in all an aspect of ceremony that focuses on light. In the darkness, let there be light!
Winter solstice, for example, literally heralds the return of the light. Today, at 9:47 a.m. on the western coast of the continental United States the earth’s axial tilt is farthest away from the sun. In light terms, this is the shortest day of the year. From now until mid-June of 2010, our days will gradually get longer and the sun will incrementally rise in its daily path across the sky.
In the midst of the more commercial tangents of our seasonal celebrations we can easily forget about this turning of the seasons in the natural world that surrounds us. The solstices themselves transcend religious ideology: they are simply astronomical facts. Unlike our forebears, we no longer participate in—or pay much attention to—the cyclic interaction between the earth and the heavens. D. H. Lawrence lamented this fact many decades ago:
“Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox! This is what is the matter with us, we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.”
This week, while doing some de-cluttering work in my studio space, I came upon a cardboard merchandise tag I saved from approximately two years ago. It’s a promotional tag from a Christmas advertising campaign launched that year by one of largest popular lingerie chains in the US. I recall exactly why I decided to hang on to it. I was shocked at the theme of the campaign, which was etched in bold letters and silver ink: “Give me everything I want and nothing I need.”
I cannot guess what D. H. Lawrence would say about this slogan, but I’m fairly certain he would see it as an equal catastrophe.
Richard Heinberg, in his 1993 book Celebrate the Solstice: Honoring the Earth’s Seasonal Rhythms through Festival and Ceremony, expresses our split from the natural world in this way:
“Now, we seem to be interested only in our human business. We rarely look up at the night sky, and we tend to observe a sunrise or sunset with only casual interest. Meanwhile, human society creaks and groans under the weight of violence, injustice, overpopulation, poverty, and greed. And our ties with nature are strained nearly to the breaking point from water and air pollution, the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, species extinctions, and deforestation. Could there be a connection between our ignorance of the seasonal festivals and our loss or relatedness with one another and with the Earth?”
As we give ourselves a break from “our human business” to gather with family and friends this Holiday Season, let us give thanks for the light that literally creates our days and symbolically informs our consciousness as living, breathing, and loving human beings.
Whatever the challenges you have encountered this year, consider the ways in which your circumstances have helped you to grow as a person. Whatever your traditions at this particular time of year, I invite you to take a moment to pause and contemplate your place in the cosmos; to acknowledge and appreciate this turning of the seasons from the dark of winter into the growing light of spring.
When you light a candle in your living room or plug in the lights on the Christmas tree this week, remember and express gratitude for the light in all its myriad shapes and forms.
With our best wishes for the Season
All of us at Upside to the Downturn would like to take this opportunity to say “thank you” for your participation in our growing community.
We’ll be taking a little break from the column until the New Year. However, in the interim, we will be busy behind the scenes creating a new website to introduce a new “Upside Life” community experience.
Stay tuned!! We are very excited about where we are headed for 2010 and beyond and look forward to your continued support and engagement.
Warmest regards,
The Team at Upside to the Downturn
Contributed by Steve Goldberg
Of the multitude of books written about happiness, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert (Random House, 2006) is one of my favourites and, in literary circles, one of the most respected. Gilbert combines incredible wit with powerful and compelling research.
Gilbert is a professor of social psychology at Harvard University who himself makes for a great Upside story. According to his bio, at age 19 he was a high school dropout with dreams of writing science fiction. When a creative writing class at his community college was full, he enrolled in the only available course: psychology. He found his passion there, went on to earn a doctorate in social psychology in 1985 at Princeton, and has since won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize for his work at Harvard.
His major premise in the book is that we as humans are very poor predictors of what will bring us future happiness.
The cover description of the book points out that:
“in our ardent, lifelong pursuit of happiness, most of us have the wrong map. In the same way that optical illusions fool our eyes—and fool everyone’s eyes in the same way—Gilbert argues that our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy. And these quirks in our cognition make humans very poor predictors of our own bliss.”
Gilbert recently did a brilliant talk for Ted.com about his ideas:
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/97
At one point he cites research on lottery winners as well as people who became wheel chair bound due to a traumatic accident. Not surprisingly, the lottery winners expressed a higher level of initial enthusiasm. However, as little as a year later both groups statistically self-reported equal measures of overall happiness and appreciation for life.
It made me wonder, is it possible that we overestimate the satisfaction and happiness that money, acquisitions, and status will bring to our life and at the same time underestimate the learning and insights that often occur when we take the time — or are forced to take the time — to reflect and learn from challenging circumstances?
I personally agree with psychotherapist and author Thomas Moore’s premise in his 1992 book Care of the Soul: that perhaps our most opportune times to cultivate depth and genuineness in our lives—to grow and develop soul—are those when we are out of balance, shaken out of the comfort of our usual day-to-day patterns and the sleepy reverie they induce. It is at times like these that we are brought back to basics, including a fresh and searching look at what really matters to us and what brings meaning to our lives.
Questions:
- What currently brings you happiness in your life? Do you have a sense of what will bring you happiness in the future?
- Daniel Gilbert believes that because we are such poor predictors of our future happiness the best way to predict our future happiness is to speak to others who have accomplished or possess something that we desire. Have you had experience with this method? What did you learn about yourself?
Contributed By Steve Goldberg
I received a lovely email message last week complimenting our work at Upside to the Downturn. The message was from Tim McSorley, who coordinates a Canadian National Film Board program called GDP: Measuring the Human Side of the Canadian Economic Crisis
He thought our subscribers might be particularly interested in a short, four minute film called Sisterhood is Frugal. I viewed it, thought it was great, and wanted to share it with you.
Sisterhood is Frugal is part of a web documentary series entitled The Savers Club and follows Dani, a debt-ridden Calgary radio deejay who admits she’s an “emotional spender”. She realizes she is not alone. Pushed by the economic downturn, she resolves to get smarter about her personal finances and forms a self-help group for women who spend too much.
Emotional spending is an issue for many people. In an article entitled Get Emotional Spending Under Control¹, Amy Fontinelle states that:
“Advertisers spend billions of dollars annually convincing us that products can make us feel successful, prevent us from being bored, help us attract the opposite sex, and a myriad of other things. When ads are carefully designed to manipulate our spending habits, it’s no wonder so many people have become emotional spenders.”
Click here to watch Dani’s brief video, as well as continue with the rest of this story.
Questions for Consideration:
- What, if anything, have you learned about yourself and your spending habits over the last 12 months of this recession?
- Do you consider yourself to be an emotional spender? That is, someone whose wallet tends to be run by their emotions, spending not because they need something or even because they really want it, but because they have stress or problems in other areas of their lives and want to feel better through “retail therapy”.
- Have you recently tried to change this type of spending? If so, what’s been helpful to you?
- What advice, from your own experience, do you have for other emotional spenders?
¹Get Emotional Spending Under Control, by Amy Fontinelle, offers a number of useful tips and techniques for reducing unwanted expenditures. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/08/emotional-spending.asp
A note about the GDP archives: Over the next year, some 250 short films and photo essays will be added to the site. You can join the conversation by visiting http://gdp.nfb.ca and uploading your own videos or images, plus you can provide comments on the many themes and stories on the site. The goal is to develop a broad exchange and dialogue as people live out challenges and triumphs during the current economic crisis.
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