Finding quite a few of these 22 things I learned in 2022 posts. If I feel like I actually learned 22 things in this past year, I might cook up my own.
But for now, let me share this one:
3. When you feel lonely, it’s because you think nobody loves you or loves you the way you wanna be loved. But accept all love as love. Understand that no one knows how to love perfectly. And that at each point in our lives someone is always trying to love us. Accept the trying as being enough.
Joy and happiness are born of concentration. When you are having a cup of tea, the value of that experience depends on your concentration. You have to drink the tea with 100 percent of your being. The true pleasure is experienced in the concentration. When you walk and you are 100 percent concentrated, the joy you get from the steps you are taking is much greater than the joy you would get without concentration. You have to invest 100 percent of your body and mind in the act of walking. Then you will experience that being alive and taking steps on this planet are miraculous things.
The Zen master Linji (also known as Rinzai) said, “The miracle is walking on the earth, not walking on water or fire. The real miracle is walking on this earth.”
Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
So what is noticing? A pinpoint of awareness, The detail that stands out amid all the details. It’s catching your sleeve on the thorn of the thing you notice And paying attention as you free yourself.
But Christmas? For we seekers after the perfect daily routine, Christmas and other holidays are the worst. The season of rest and good cheer merely exacerbates the drama involved in trying to find some kind of rhythm. In our house, by this point in December, we’re a good week into the period when no day is a “normal day”, thanks to school plays, school fairs, school holidays, carol services, parties, shopping trips, travel plans or family visits… and there are a couple more weeks of it to go yet.
How’s an uptight misanthropist-perfectionist supposed to keep a daily routine going in the midst of all that? You can’t, obviously. And so the risk is that a period with the potential to be absorbingly delightful (because really, I love school plays and carol services) becomes something to “get through” instead – an obstacle one must get past before “real life” can resume, simply because it can’t be made to conform to how you think your days ought to go.
The more general (and marginally less Grinchy) point here is that there’s often a deep tension between the desire many of us feel to exert control over our time – because we believe, if perhaps only subconsciously, that something will go very wrong if we don’t do so – and the possibility of actually being fully absorbed in that time. Trying too hard to dictate how things unfold stops them unfolding properly. So it’s not really that the Christmas holiday gets in the way of real life. That would be absurd: Christmas is part of my real life, and a part I cherish. It’s my desire to control things that causes the real trouble.
This holiday season I asked myself why the holidays make me feel anxious.
There’s definitely an aspect of it about wanting to do things the “right” way, or at the very least not feeling like the person responsible if things don’t go as planned.
But maybe the biggest issue I have is the internal battle for emotional regulation and self control.
There are things I want to do, and ways I need to work to maintain a positive (or at least functional) mental state, and a wave of holidays is inherently disruptive to that.
Looking at it from Burkeman’s perspective, maybe there’s a way going forward where I can find the things that anchor me and prioritize them, instead of thinking that reactively trying to “get through” the tasks and worries of the moment.
That I can better enjoy the moment as it happens if I make sure I’m taking that time to ground myself in the moment.
We needed to limit things this Christmas with a family member testing positive for COVID. So we focused on the essential and made sure enough Christmas happened while prioritizing taking care of each other.
Did it mean that I didn’t feel some degree of guilt about the things I wasn’t doing? Of course not. Who do you think you’re dealing with?
This Builds Character 
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