You might not ever be gathered with the same people in the same place, not next year, not ever. So this Christmas, sever yourself from the past and the future, stop calculating everything, and simply enjoy it.
It may seem like a bad dream only two short years later, but the experts recommended we cancel, or at least greatly curtail, Christmas celebrations in both 2020 and 2021. Personally, I had no plans to listen to people whose first authoritarian impulse was to lock us in our homes and keep us there for as long as they deemed fit, but as chance would have it, my wife, most of the household, and I came down with COVID-19 for the first time between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2020. We ended up canceling our plans anyway whether we were prepared to comply or not. We couldn’t possibly have known at the time that it would be my father’s last Christmas, after being hospitalized for coronavirus and then succumbing to sepsis early in 2021. The last time my wife and I saw him was Thanksgiving at our house, in fact, where we gathered for a final holiday against the prevailing expert opinion. If we had dutifully complied as our betters insisted, I’m not sure what my last memories of him would have been because we were barred from seeing him in the hospital in his final days, as so many were cruelly denied a last chance to see or properly say goodbye to their loved ones. In that regard, my mother was lucky. She’d lived in the same house in Central New Jersey since 1988 and the police knew my sister lived down the block. When the hospital realized my father had taken a turn for the worse late one Saturday night and his departure from this world was imminent, they were able to reach my mom through my sister. She got to see him one last time, albeit half-comatose and unable to communicate. This year, my wife lost her mother in our own home and was similarly able to say goodbye. Those final moments are priceless, whatever the state of your loved one, that we might miss them or forcibly be denied them is unconscionable, yet a fact of life. I do not recount these events to garner sympathy, but merely to illustrate how life is largely determined by a combination of your own personal desires and actions, the actions of others especially those that have power over you, and simple chance. The future is unknowable, even in its broadest contours considering factors beyond your control such as government shutdowns, war, disease, and more can radically alter the trajectory of your life, well beyond what you would have considered possible right up until it happened. My father had health issues, and as a family, we anticipated he was in his final years, but no one would have believed the precise way his passing unfolded if the Ghost of Christmas Future had appeared to reveal the future in 2019. The same applies to my mother-in-law.
I’m sure anyone reading this will have a similar tale during the pandemic – or otherwise – when an unexpected confluence of events completely and totally changes your life, whether or not you wish it so. Consciously, all of us know this. We might plan and plot, budget and save, scrimp and perhaps even scam, but there are limits to our foresight and the control we have over events. Anyone can get hit by a car crossing the street, sideswiped on the way to a holiday gathering, or even struck by lightning and in some cases, we can do absolutely nothing about it. We could be doing the right thing and still be dead before we even know it, through no fault of our own. In this fashion, we are guaranteed the moment we are in – right here, right now, my eyes peering at the screen, my fingers tapping over the keys, my brain desperately searching for whatever word comes next, noticing a few spots on the monitor that need to be cleaned and a slight tightness to my back that indicates I’m not 18 anymore – nothing more and nothing else. It is unlikely I will have a massive stroke getting up for my mid afternoon coffee in a few minutes, but it is possible; it happened to Luke Perry and fells a couple of thousand of otherwise healthy people a year. I cannot say for sure, and yet I am about to do precisely that – I will be back in a moment or not. Further, the fact that I made it back to my desk this time does not imply the same positive result tomorrow or the day after, nor that I will wake up in the morning or even survive through dinner this evening. If we were purely rational creatures, the reality that we are each of us plunging into an unknown that might well end in our deaths each and every moment of every day, would likely drive us mad. Logically speaking, we can accept that everything we see, do, touch, and love must have a beginning and an end, but not knowing what that end is or when it will occur inserts the irrevocable element of chance, exposing us to things we cannot control. Somehow, however, this does not prevent us from planning ahead – if not obsessing about the future. We may live in the moment, but when you consider how much time the average person spends thinking about what comes next – the meal you will eat for dinner, the plans you have next weekend, next month, next summer, chores that need to be done, bills that need to be paid, and more – the moment itself, that is what we have, what we are feeling, and what we are doing right now – loses most, if not all meaning.
Of course, most of us spend an equal number of these moments reminiscing – or again, obsessing – about the past, lost in the remembrance of things good and bad, vicariously reliving moments in our own heads, moments that we know consciously are gone, never to return, never to be changed because the past no longer really exists. Still, we cannot help taking stock, evaluating where we have been in life and making judgments about the positive and the negative. For me personally, there have been a few years that stand out above all others. The year I graduated high school and went to college. The year I made my first independent film. The year I got married, and just this last year when I set foot in six countries on three continents, traveled some 30,000 plus miles, and saw Bruce Springsteen three times among many other things, from two races to a wedding and funeral. (Interestingly, at one of these races the team in the garage next to us, who we had seen many times before but never had the chance to meet, referred to me and my brother as “hardcore” because it’s just the two of us and not an entire team. Meanwhile, we always considered ourselves the opposite because we show up late and only race for fun, suggesting how much things depend on your perspective). I count the past year this way to reveal a tendency to extract a kind of metrics from our memories, using data to perform a meta-analysis as though we could quantify our lives by the number of times we’ve done something. We do not merely relive the past in actual memories, ostensibly formed while events were happening and when we were best able to capture the moment, we attempt to account for it, adding up the good, subtracting the bad, and dividing it or multiplying it over time. All of us do it seemingly instinctually – I’ve seen this movie ten times, been here every year for ten years, gone to that restaurant a hundred times, or what have you – but rarely do we consider precisely how odd our obsession with quantifying everything meaningful to us on some type of mental spreadsheet truly is. Outside of a competition or sport, what does it really matter? Most would probably claim they do things multiple times because they enjoy them, that is a given activity gives us pleasure in the moment, or at least a memory after the moment, but if that is really the case – and the activity in question continues to bring you enjoyment – what does adding it up in some necessarily arbitrary and largely meaningless fashion do? It’s almost as if we add up the past because we cannot count on the future, but whatever the case, there is no doubt that the large majority of us spend most of our lives thinking ahead and looking behind.
The moment itself, that is where we are right now is frequently an afterthought even though it is all we truly have before it’s gone. In this, humans appear to be unique among all our primate cousins, mammal extended family, and the entire animal kingdom, from the birds and bees to the fish in the sea. George Carlin once noted that everything lasts forever to a dog, each moment an eternity, either patiently waiting for something of interest to happen around them or completely lost in what is happening. Dogs, however, have excellent memories. They can recognize people and places years later, close to a full decade in a life that doesn’t last much longer. Dogs also maintain a rather detailed schedule, following a routine from when they go for a walk in the morning to when they go to bed at night. Our greyhound, Rosie, shoots up the stairs ahead of us at bedtime. Our coon hound Lily, knows – or at least thinks she knows – precisely when it’s time to eat. Somehow, however, our canine companions simply don’t get lost in either the past or the future even though there is nothing in principle that prevents them from doing so (by in principle, I mean, they have the cognitive abilities necessary to both reminisce and fret about the future). Instead, they live entirely in the moment. Some might suggest that dogs do not have conceptions of their own bodies like the great apes, but even there we have no indication that whatever thoughts other primates have are so focused on what is not in front of them. What accounts for the difference? Are we that much smarter (dumber?) then them and all our animal friends that we alone cannot simply enjoy the world around us, as it is unfolding in the here and now? Perhaps, but to me at least it seems more of a difference of kind than merely degree. The smartest dog or chimpanzee who ever lived didn’t waste their time worrying about what they can’t change or what might happen that they can do nothing about. The difference, it seems clear, has to be language, which is essential a means to separate something from the moment by labelling it independent of the moment. There is no other creature in the known universe whose thoughts are organized into words, whose mind is structured around words, whose entire being is either described in words or even when an experience transcends language, we say it is indescribable in direct comparison to the rest of the words we have. (The late, great hard partying linguist, Derek Bickerton once remarked that we may teach apes up to a 1,000 words and that is no mean feat, but the most instructive aspect is they do not then teach language to other apes. To them, it is something to do for a reward, not some grand discovery to change their view of the world.)
We cannot, for the most part, summon the totality of an emotion or feeling we’ve experienced. We can instead summon only a little piece of it, a shadow if you will, and our own description, marked as good or bad, quantified as it might fit into our lifetime metrics. Ironically, in one of those contradictions that define human experience, words can be said to be trapping us in the past and the future rather than allowing us to live in the present, and yet they also free us from the constraints of our bodies and the limitations of experience in general. With words, we can imagine whatever we want, describe things we cannot see, even things that cannot be in principle. Words are even more useful than that, however. Language binds us to our loved ones, friends, family, neighbors, country men and women, even complete strangers. When people get together outside of a movie, play, or concert, they talk. Even in the context of non-talking events, they do so before and after. We even go so far as to say that some people simply can’t shut up, as in they talk too much or remark on why others might be so strangely quiet, perhaps even finding them odd. Seinfeld featured a close talker, a low talker, and a high talker. Language enables us to navigate the world, builds bonds, breaks down barriers, forms governments, is the foundation of civilization and culture, underpins the economy, is central to art, is a part of almost everything we do, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. If we stopped being able to communicate with each other tomorrow as the classic Bible story goes, the entire world would collapse in less than a day. Closer to home, language is at the center of every holiday as we gather and talk, catching up with friends and family, sharing our experiences and opinions, remarking on the events of the last year and our plans for the future. On an even deeper, subconscious level, we might say that all of us is little more than a large constellation of words and phrases, that you can take all of our thoughts and ideas, experiences, hopes, dreams, and aspirations, and write them down somewhere in some uniquely complicated way that represents us as an individual. The feeling of being in the moment, those parts of life that are indescribable like the sun on your skin, would be lost, but almost everything else about us would remain, even if we were, as philosopher’s claim, reduced to being an unconscious zombie. This may sound far-fetched to some, but there are those who believe that human consciousness can be transferred to a computer. If so, computers are collections of code, which is structured language, and data, which is also structured language. Chat-GPT, for example, is known as a large language model. Language, therefore, could very well be the key to intelligence and ultimately immortality. It is most, if not all of us. Returning to the irony, language is the part that exists outside the moment and yet the moment is all we really have. Putting it another way, you could say that language represents nothing that matters even how we use it to represent everything that matters.
At this point, most of you are properly wondering what any of this has to do with Christmas: Everything and, perhaps not surprisingly in the context of this post, nothing. Everything in the sense that we all too often approach a holiday with an odd, unsustainable combination of dread over what might or might not have transpired on holiday’s past, figuratively haunted by ghosts straight out of Charles Dickens, and an expectation that this time might well be different, we will truly make those special memories we see in the movies or on Hallmark cards. The result is stress rather than enjoyment, fretting rather than celebrating, and the moment something doesn’t measure up to our expectations, however unrealistic or arbitrarily metric-driven, we are disappointed, wondering if the holidays are worth it after all. In the meantime, the moment – gathered with family and friends over a fine meal – is lost, buried in the past and future, the words we use to describe and anticipate both, and the metrics we have assigned to it. Perhaps even worse, we do so knowing the moment will never come again, or any moment like it. You might not ever be gathered with the same people in the same place, not next year, not ever. So this Christmas, sever yourself from the past and the future, stop calculating everything, and simply enjoy it. There is nothing like it and never will be again. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 