One of my most beloved memories of the post-Christmas season is from my teens, sitting alone in the livingroom of my mother’s house in Limerick with an armchair pulled up next to the TV. I was around 15, and I sat for the entire four hour three minute runtime of the 1963 classic Cleopatra, working my way slowly, deliberately through an entire tub of Häagen-Dazs Bailey’s Ice Cream with a teaspoon. It was a feeling of pure bliss, unfettered by anxiety, obligation or the gaze of others.
No “Betwixtmas” in adulthood has ever lent me such a feeling of peace as that afternoon spent marvelling at Elizabeth Taylor’s elaborate costumes and Richard Burton’s dodgier ones. Each December, the relentless pace of modern life slackens. We spend the entire year white-knuckling our way through at breakneck speed, mostly just trying not to fall off altogether, and then suddenly we arrive at this odd week or so of kind-of-nothing. It’s ours to determine what to do with.
For many of us, this is the only true downtime in our annual calendar. You can take a summer holiday but the world still roils around you. Social media remains frantic, outraged and consumed by the moment. Only at Christmas do we collectively consent to slow down. Work emails and texts stop for all but the most unfortunate, or those who have frontline jobs. There is a shared understanding that anything substantive is now January’s problem, when we will return to it in the pinched, impecunious resentment of a newly minted year. For now, we drift through this strange lacuna, walking off heavy meals without any destination in mind, watching TV and catching up with people we may only see once a year (often for good reason).
If we’re lucky, the week is ours to consider as we choose. It lands with a stillness that might be a gift or might feel oppressive, depending on how we look at it. These days are an interval that sits outside time for good reason – not quite part of the closing year, nor strictly linked to the one to come. This is, in a deep rather than a shallow way, “down time”.
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It can be disorienting. We may wonder why the slowness we’ve spent the year craving frightens us now it’s finally here. The absence of urgency can make us anxious. It leaves space for us to notice the things we spend most of our time ignoring, putting off or pushing past. Typically, we respond in one of two ways. First, we ruminate; anxiously dissecting the past year for signs of progress or meaning, or projecting into new the year and how we’ll correct our perceived failings. We worry ourselves into new echelons of worry, persuaded that yielding to this can give us the clarity we’d be comforted by.
[ Christmas is about pretending for the sake of those we love. It’s magicOpens in new window ]
Second, we indulge in avoidance – the accepted Irish cultural response to personal discomfort. It’s not just Uncle Jim being off the wagon again, running from the dragons of his complex past. We all do it. We fill the stillness with dumb TV. We eat Christmas-dinner sandwiches for breakfast until the ham starts greying and we think we’d better not risk it today. We have a Bailey’s at 3pm.
Or maybe you come from an “active” family and everyone is up for a run at seven on New Year’s morning. “We’re running up a mountain. What we’re not doing is talking about how we never talk about anything.”
Both approaches are human, and, as established, I’m all for overeating at Christmas (if less enthused by running up mountains). Yet it’s useful to ask why we struggle so terribly with stillness; why it is that finally having a moment to think can flood us with things we usually try not to think about.
Political theorist Hannah Arendt framed this dynamic in a surprisingly helpful way, even if it was totalitarianism and not a nice week off that she had in mind. In The Life of the Mind, she described the importance of what she called “two-in-one” conversation – the inner dialogue we have when we think. Arendt suggested that thinking is not the problem-solving we do all the time at work, or the planning we perform to ensure the routine runs smoothly. Rather, thinking is a withdrawal from activity that can only really happen when our routine falls away.
Real thinking interrupts momentum. It slows us down, burns the toast, forgets to collect granny at the station. It breaks our ability to automate our days, forcing us to examine assumptions and view our lives with the perspective that distance allows. This should unsettle us, Arendt suggests. It is meant to – it is brave.
[ Stop to think, and think to be happy: Hannah Arendt’s credo for lifeOpens in new window ]
This time of year throws many of us abruptly into solitude. If you want to think, Arendt suggests, this is good. For her, solitude is a set of conditions that makes thinking possible by facilitating our internal dialogue. Loneliness, on the other hand, is the distress that oozes forth when we are alone but can’t sustain this inner dialogue. It is when encountering ourselves becomes unbearable. Because we don’t get much practice in Arendt’s version of solitude these days, and because there are phones and Netflix and tubs of ice cream, we automatically reach for whatever will distract us from this unfamiliar sensation of our minds making themselves audible to us.
It all feels strange, and maybe a little unsafe, as our brains reveal what we fear, dislike and desire. In marches regret, resentment or a yearning we have dedicated energy to ignoring. Arendt didn’t suggest that thinking makes life easier. She just thought it makes life clearer. These in-between days don’t need an epiphany or a set of resolutions or a self-help mindset. We’ll be flooded with all that soon enough, and it will fold neatly into the usual momentum of a mercilessly paced year. Instead, these days offer a brief suspension of the patterns that we usually just allow to drag us along as usual. Our minds are briefly untethered from routine. It is useful to watch where they go. It doesn’t mean we can’t eat the ice cream too.
