Once
the last vestige of turkey leftovers make their way to the garbage disposal or
trash can at the curb, the Christmas holiday preparations REALLY begin to gather
SPEED... twinkling lights are ubiquitous; spruce,
pine and fir trees stand at the ready: prearranged green-needle
soldiers in sundry neighborhood lots. Sporting branches of supple emerald, they
wait to be plucked up and carefully placed on vehicle roof-racks. Later, one
can imagine they simply beam like the brightest north star while being adorned
with ornament jewels and vivid ruby roping...
That said, over-the-top holiday mania is not entirely
healthy. The amygdala in our brain gets over-stressed by the mental riding crop
urging individuals to go 'faster, faster' in order to get 'more, more'. The
FOMO mantra certainly needs a measure of quieting...
True, some can 'run faster' than others but
if we spur our brain beyond its cognitive comfort zone, "bad things"
can happen...
Mental exhaustion can be seen in real-time
via the modality of fMRI. Not only that, over-taxed adrenal glands eventually hurl
one into the gaping mouth of depression. Allen Ginsberg's poem HOWL begins as
such: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness".
It goes on to rant about individuals "dragging themselves" at dawn,
searching for their "angry fix" of heroin. Too much but never enough ?
Yet,
there most definitely ARE some quotes that express what the upcoming holiday
season SHOULD bring to mind:
***************************
"As we struggle with shopping lists and invitations,
compounded by December's bad weather, it is good to be reminded that there are
people in our lives who are worth this aggravation, and people to whom we are
worth the same." - Donald E. Westlake
"May your walls know joy,
may every room hold laughter, and every window open to great possibility."
- Mary Anne
Radmacher
"Sharing the
holiday with other people, and feeling that you’re giving of yourself, gets you
past all the commercialism." - Caroline Kennedy
"The joy of brightening other lives, bearing each
others' burdens, easing others' loads and supplanting empty hearts and lives
with generous gifts becomes for us the magic of the holidays." -
W. C. Jones
"The holiest of holidays are
those kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the
heart." - Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow
