In this holiday season when all the talk is of family and being together, a deserted island might strike you as a place of intolerable loneliness, or it might seem like a paradise where you could finally have room to breathe and be yourself. Even the most social of us need moments when we can be alone with our own thoughts.
How will you find a moment today to cherish being by yourself?
The stores and the radio are full of songs about dashing through the snow and letting it snow and all forms of a white Christmas. But for half of the world this is summer, and even many of us in the Northern Hemisphere will never see snow. Oftentimes the picture that the world paints of what our holidays should look like has very little correspondence with reality. Far better to build a “snowman” on the beach than to fret about how your life doesn’t match someone else’s picture.
What unconventional bits of your holidays do you treasure?
Throughout the eight nights of Hanukkah it is traditional to play a sort of gambling game with the dreidel, a little top with Hebrew characters on the side which indicate how many pieces you may take out or must put in. But the game only works because at the start of each round each player contributes to the common pot. You never know how much you will take out; you only know that the game is possible because each person contributes.
What will you put in for the common pot of a community today?
“The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect [people].” –George Eliot
How might your imperfections help you to move the world forward?
In Sweden Santa Lucia, or Saint Lucy’s Day is welcomed in by a girl with a crown of evergreens and candles on her head. January 13 was the solstice in the old, Julian candle, so the day honoring Saint Lucy was a way of ushering in the growing light. But in Sweden you will have to wait quite a long time past December before you will see much of any light at all.
How do you find patience to wait for the light when it is nowhere to be seen?
