Monthly Archives: February 2017

Projecting

20 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by in Mindfulness, Seasons, Stress, Summer, Winter

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

I have a tendency—and I suspect many people do—to let my mind wander in stressful situations to some point at which the situation has been resolved, is over, or can be comfortably ignored. The first time I remember this happening was when I was ten years old, and I sustained a bad injury. As I was sitting in the kitchen with my mother holding me, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, my mind wandered from the pain and the fear of what had happened to later that evening, when I imagined my mother would make me tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. I saw myself sitting and eating my soup calmly, the injury bandaged, the pain a thing of the past.

I have been involved in a court proceeding lately, which is very stressful. I was sitting in the courthouse a while back waiting for my attorney to meet me and discuss the likelihood of making progress on the case that day. I projected myself forward to later that night, when I had plans to meet some friends for dinner. I heard the laughter of my friends, felt the warmth of the restaurant, and thought about what I might order. That filled a few lonely moments for me.

I think this is a good mechanism for shielding ourselves from too much stress. Why sit there stewing about the problem at hand if simply projecting our thoughts forward to a calmer time can help relieve the pain? But there is also the tendency, in the extremely artificial lives we lead, to project ourselves out of too much, and into later times, thus robbing ourselves of a good portion of life.

We inhabit a ‘living for the weekend’ culture. We spend 5/7 of our lives pining for the other 2/7 of it. Sure, there are some people who love their work, but it is still work, and can’t compare, for pure joy, to the freedom of the weekend. The irony is that many of us actually do more work on the weekends. I am a library director. People truly don’t understand what my work involves, but my to-do list on the average day includes 10 to 12 items of varying degrees of urgency. But it’s true, it’s mostly administrative, clerical, paperwork. Some of it is even creative work that can be very gratifying. When I lived on the ranch, my weekends were always 8 to 10 hour days of grass cutting, moving hay, turning manure piles, mending fences, tilling gardens, and much more. But still I pined for the weekend as much as a day laborer who would spend his Saturday and Sunday fishing a quiet stream.

We also wish away whole seasons. I really believe that in the most ancient times, humans hibernated, or did something close to it, when the weather got cold. Remember, the earliest Roman calendar didn’t even count the months of January and February, just skipping those days until spring arrived. But for many centuries now we have evolved a lifestyle in which we expect to be fully engaged every week of every month. But both the cold of winter and the heat of summer wear us down and make us weary and longing for something else.

In older times, people had natural breaks in the year, times when activity slowed down. We still celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas, both of which are simply modern takes on ancient harvest festivals. But we don’t understand or pay attention to what they are supposed to be about; they are reduced to special days. Even people who post the Jesus is the Reason for the Season signs miss the operative word in that phrase—the Season. It’s supposed to be a season, a time set aside, a time to rest, recuperate. Instead it’s just a holiday, and work resumes the next day.

But our constant activity wears us down. It does no good to rail that this is an effect of capitalist society—which of course it is; commerce must go on and take no breaks!—nothing will change. For one thing, the people who make out best within that capitalist society vacation in Florida and other warm places in winter, or find lakeside houses and other cool retreats at summer’s height. I know people who spend so much time in their Florida abodes that they have surrendered citizenship in their home state. But of course these are options unavailable to you and me, or to 99.9% of the human population, and the boss doesn’t care.

Is it a problem that we wish away the last several weeks of winter? Groundhog day finds even the most rational among us wondering if the damn rodent saw his shadow. Or that we wish away most of the month of August, pulling our sweaters out of storage the first day the high temperature doesn’t break the 70s? It’s all well and good for the mindfulness crowd to urge you to be present in every moment, or for someone like me who obsesses about the seasons to insist that you should experience every season for what it is: in the end, we are humans, mammals who evolved within the seasons on earth. We can adapt to extremes of heat and cold, but that doesn’t mean we like them.

Fortunately we are also the only animals with a brain large enough to permit special functions like daydreaming about better, more salubrious times. My court case will extend deep into spring. My work is full of special challenges at this moment. I am like all of us in wishing for some magical, blessed, almost definitely non-existent time when everything will be better. Maybe tomorrow, or the next day . . .

Feb-yoo-ary

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by in February, Groundhog Day, Julian Calendar, President's Day, Seasons, Valentine's Day

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

February is a mess, however you look at it—or should I say ‘feb-yoo-ary,’ since most people can’t even pronounce it correctly. That’s right, it’s the only month whose root word is not found in Latin, but in the old Sabine language. Long history.

The first Roman calendar was weird. It is reputed to have been the creation of Romulus, the legendary first king of Rome. Yes, ‘legendary,’ meaning probably didn’t exist, and you know how Western Civilization likes to blame all of its worst things on people who never existed. This first calendar only had ten months, and ran from March to December. I guess nobody did anything important for the next sixty days, so they just didn’t count them. After Romulus no Latin would step up to be the next king, so they forced the position on a Sabine fellow named Numa Pompilius, who didn’t really want it either, though he did a pretty good job. He added the extra months to the calendar, naming January after the god Janus, and February for the Sabine spring preparation ritual called februa. Note here that it was always a given that the year started in March—in spring. Mars, the god whose name is evoked in the month, used to be as much a god of agriculture as a god of war. But we forget that now, since we don’t start the year where we’re supposed to.

It was Julius Caesar whose calendar changed the year in 44 BC, adding the leap year, and starting the year in January. Historians have said he changed the new year for this reason, that reason, and the other reason. In the end I think he did it because he was Caesar and he could. This pestiferous nuisance of a new year has been with us ever since, and it makes things so confusing! February, with its short number of days, was always meant to be the last month, the tag-end, the makeup month. Caesar’s new calendar added the extra leap year day at the end of February, but then didn’t allow it to remain at the end of the year where it was supposed to be. It’s now the second month. This just makes no sense. Since March is now the third month, the last three months of the year are clearly mis-numbered and nobody is worried about correcting that.

In February we are far enough from the winter solstice that there is noticeably more sunlight and it lasts longer in the day, but it’s still cold. We had Groundhog Day this week, on a day when temperatures reached into the 50s (F), but this morning we’re hovering in the low 20s. With all that sunlight people like to think spring is in the air, but if it is, that air is as frigid as any we’ve known all winter. The whole groundhog phenomenon, as well as a raft of other animal-related prognostications cited throughout history, is about the optimism of springtime’s imminent return; but that optimism will be dashed time and again by the coldest days and largest snowfalls of the winter.

February’s holidays are anomalies. Valentine’s Day is supposed to be all about love and romance, but I think we all know what it really is: the annual test of your ability to purchase the correct mementos verifying the scale and persistence of your affection. Or about feelings of suicide. There is a notable spike in calls to suicide hotlines on or around February 14. The severity of the ‘broken heart syndrome’ that besets so many people on this day is attested by the fact that it has its own technical name: takotsubo cardiomyopathy (first diagnosed in Japan, thus the name.) Whether one is single or paired up, Valentine’s Day usually ends up being the least romantic, most stressful date on the calendar. The other February holiday, President’s Day, is no better, usually falling on the birthday of no president. When I was a kid we had two presidents’ birthdays in February, but we can’t do that anymore! What? Two holidays in one month? There’s work to be done! So we have a federal holiday on a randomly selected Monday, where the accomplishments of the two greatest leaders in American history—George Washington and Abraham Lincoln—are honored with furniture sales. In fairness I should note that these are often really good sales, worthy of the name Presidents’ Day Blowout!—but still . . .

So the next  time you hear someone say ‘feb-yoo-ary’ and the grammar Nazi in you wants to gently correct them, I would advise letting it go. The month is altogether a lost cause. At least it’s a short month, so we can thank somebody for that.