Christmas causes me to be more introspective than usual. An inward look probably isn’t a rare occurrence during the holiday though. It’s almost the end of another year and so the timing is right for an assessment of the previous 360 days and the choices you’ve made during that time that turned life into living.
Some choices for me were good. Some were not so good and some weren’t choices at all, but rather obligations or reactions to events beyond my control. I suppose that a person always has choices, but obligations to family, friends and conscience tend to limit your options, assuming that you maintain any interest in projecting an air of civility.
Peer and societal pressure to assimilate feels to me like a constant assault, but the Christmas season in particular makes me feel under siege to conform to the hypocrisy of seasonal goodwill and the hype of consumer fever. That fever by the way, is well hidden in the camouflage of peace on earth and the goodwill bullshit I was talking about a minute ago.
Christmas is like a ten day funeral to me. I wear clothes I don’t usually wear. I listen to topical music I never hear any other time and I participate in rituals I don’t believe in. I participate because everyone else is doing it.
But, alcohol and presents are involved and I get to hang with people I like drinking with and buying presents for, so it’s easy to shrug and allow yourself to get swept up in the spirit of the season. Even if the person that smiled at you and wished you a happy holiday on December 24th is the same person leaning on their horn and giving you the finger on the 26th. Because you’ve apparently inconvenienced them by stopping your car so you didn’t run over the jaywalking homeless guy.
Because, it’s the 26th and Christmas is fucking over.
Christmas time is like a mooring line for me. It attaches me to a commonality of people and sentiment. But the attachment is temporary and eventually I cast myself off again and become adrift.
I think we spend our entire lives trying our damndest to be docked somewhere as opposed to adrift in a sea of uncertainty. Some of this desire to be docked is understandable. There are certain activities like employment that require a person to hitch their mooring line to the same pier day after day so that things like clothing and food are acquired. Being a wandering free spirit is only viewed admirably if the free spirit in question can afford their decision. Elon Musk and Richard Branson are admired free spirits but the bearded dude on the street corner is a homeless loser if you follow me.
So, as a result of the pursuit of the necessities of life we’re inclined to believe that being adrift in any sense is an incorrect posture to strike.
I disagree.
I remain steadfastly adrift philosophically. I have absolutely no inclination to select an anchorage that dictates thought or behaviour, and regardless of the talk from the dock, each of those anchorages does precisely that. I’m not saying that these thought harbors don’t occasionally posit an idea that I find agreeable. What I am saying is that when that idea becomes mandatory for the denizens of that dock then it’s nice to be able to quietly drift away.
The downside to a commitment to being adrift is that the quest becomes perpetual. You have to accept that you’ve consigned yourself to a lifetime of looking for answers with no certainty that you’ll ever find them. I guess that a person has to decide if they prefer certainty or uncertainty and then make your philosophical choices after that.
Still, it seems to me that once you’ve selected certainty as your preferred lifestyle that a seed of doubt should be planted with your selection. Because if you’re adrift and looking for a place to anchor then it’s got to be confusing that you have a selection of ports of certainty. They can’t all be right regardless of their claims of correctness.
Do you sail your ship to the Isle of Islam or to the continent of Christians? Maybe Hinduism harbor or Pagan peninsula? All of them with separate sirens beckoning you to join them with promises of immortality and enlightenment. All of them righteously assured and disdainful or violent to the other mirror images of themselves.
I prefer to remain adrift. Those ports of call give me a headache. Actually to be precise, the denizens of those ports of call give me a headache.
I operate under the premise that there is a seed of truth or wisdom in every philosophy that humanity has proposed. Sadly though, that seed is often planted into a sea of bullshit. The bullshit acts as a fertilizer and helps the seed grow but the resulting tree is an aberration from the intent of the seed. The resulting foliage is more a representation of the manure that it grew in than the original kernel of thought.
So, I tend to look for the seed in the sea of manure. Sometimes the stench of that manure is so strong that my seed quest needs to end if I hope to breathe and ever get the stench out of my clothes. Unfortunately the shit smell has made finding the seed an impossibility for me.
And so once more I find myself adrift.
But at least I can breathe.