New Year's Eve Despondency

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

New Year is a bright and festive attribute of childhood. We grow up in a society where New Year's Eve is of great importance. As a child, if you were lucky enough to be born into an average family where the New Year was celebrated with a Christmas tree, rain and tangerines, the New Year felt like a peak of carelessness: we received gifts, joy, stuffed our tummies with delicious food and watched the chimes with bated breath.

What happened to us adults? One gets the impression that the irritability of a certain arithmetic team of the entire population increases precisely in the pre-New Year period. We become dull, picky about each other. We try to catch everything and sit on all the chairs at once. We negotiate with friends, make attempts to celebrate the holiday together. Which is very far from the carefree, bright childhood, when we felt that a holiday was being created for us, and were happy with what we had.

I hope you will forgive me for now, with the meticulousness inherent in psychoanalysts, I will pull out a small brick from the ideal picture of childhood memories: the event and the memory of it are two different events. The person is disposed to romanticize the past. When a person is asked what moments of his life were significant for him, most of us will readily name situations that seemed terrible and insurmountable to us at the moment when we directly experienced them!

The flip side of the medal of sentimentalization of experiences is precisely that they do not allow us to open up to new opportunities and experience the unknown!

The mistake of the “nostalgic” is largely in the fact that the balance between warm memories, light sadness and outright apathy is beyond their strength. At one point, apathy outweighs: and a person who did not wait for a miracle, which would at least slightly compare with the “retouched” memory of the situation, turns out to be a hostage of bleak thoughts.

You can get out of such a trap only by returning yourself to “realness”. Have you noticed that thinking never happens about the present? As soon as you think about it, the moment of the present disappears instantly. You missed it! All our thoughts are focused on either the past or the future. Fond memories - is it nothing more than experiencing a “preppy” version of the moment? Isn't it at least unfair on our side to try to equate the present moment with all its realities with a rebuilt version of the moment that you experienced many years ago?

Return to "realness" is possible through mindfulness practice (see my other articles on mindfulness below). Concentration on “here and now” can begin with the practice of managing attention, concentration - in general, everything that we have lost the knack of doing with the acceleration of the pace of life.

The second significant reason for the pre-New Year's despondency is the overestimated importance. Almost all of us have some “ideal” version of the New Year's Eve. It is formed thanks to the generally accepted social attitudes in which we live; is based on personal unique experience and is largely determined by the culture in which the person was born and raised (or, as is often the case, the layering of a number of cultures). Imagine how much more upset a person is capable of if the events they are facing do not fit into some well-written scenario that the person himself ordered! In other words, we rob ourselves, forbidding ourselves to experience spontaneous joy!

Readiness for the unknown, spontaneity, openness to new impressions - weren't these qualities that determined the positive perception of the new year in childhood? Who told you that the expectation of a miracle cannot be returned? The very nature of a miracle is that we don't know what it is until it happens!

By setting the stage for disappointment by “sprinkling” it with negative thoughts, we get a voluminous, branchy disappointment in all color. Fertilizing the soil with kind, light, positive thoughts (and even more so, doing it consciously!), We do our best to make our joy grow!

Once, when I was sitting on the sofa on December 31, showing my discontent with all my looks, my mother came into my room and, in response to my nagging, told me important, kind wisdom, which for many years became for me a sparkler for waiting for the new year: if there is no mood, a person has the right to create it for himself. Already after many years spent studying psychology - and just growing up! - I realized that mood - like happiness - is formed exclusively due to the inner state of a person, which a person can change himself. In other words, the outside world is not able to make us happy or sad: such magic is subject only to ourselves! To be sad or happy is the inalienable right of each of us. It is enough to recognize this right! So the choice is yours!