taking inventory // The Bright Side of Holiday Isolation
"I love the holidays, because I don't celebrate them, and it feels like everyone died."
Contrary to popular sentiment, the holiday season is a wonderful time to be alone.
It’s the 4am phenomenon. There’s a kind of magic present when your side of the world is asleep, and you’re part of the chosen few to seize the moment. In the wee hours of the night, there’s an opening of energetic portals that get the creative juices flowing through uncluttered pathways of the psyche.
Others are too lost in dreams to be clamoring about, buzzing and chattering, fretfully finding their way through the din of collective thought and activity. Everyone has finally been forced into rest. The night air is still, the lone moon illuminates to the best of its ability, with only the help of littered stars, hardly permeating the dark, unlike the all-consuming daylight.
There’s enchantment in stillness and silence. One of the most popular tales of Christmas lore is “Twas the Night Before Christmas”, which poetically touches upon this particular enchantment:
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
while visions of sugar plums danced in their heads.And Mama in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap.When out on the roof there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.Away to the window I flew like a flash,
tore open the shutter, and threw up the sash.The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
gave the lustre of midday to objects below,when, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
but a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer.With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
The narrator gets up in the middle of the night while everyone is sleeping. Everyone in the house is anticipating the gifts that the mythical St. Nicolas will clandestinely deliver in the cloak of the night.
“The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.”
The children “were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of sugar plums danced in their heads”; sound asleep in their dream world.
The narrator and their mother had just “‘settled [their] brains’ for a long winter's nap.” — denoting the mental shut down of sleep.
When there is stillness throughout the house, the narrator wakes up alone, and is delighted with a supernatural experience that would otherwise have been missed had they remained asleep with the others. While everyone is absent, drifted off into their astral fantasies, the narrator is witnessing the real thing.
When you’re awake while everyone is asleep, you gain a monopoly over your senses. You’re not being energetically pulled in so many directions. You can just “be yourself” — which really means to fully be in your own energy. It’s not necessarily about what that energy is, it’s more about the freedom to exist in it.
Choosing to retreat while the majority is in the hustle and bustle of dense activity is like finding a secret door. That’s the place where you truly “find your own lane.” While others are caught up on the battlefield, you are planning and strategizing, or you’re observing as a sole arbiter, free to capture any thought floating in the universe, like Michelangelo finding the sculpture within the marble block (as opposed to creating it out of the marble block). You’re in the driver’s seat of contemplation.
“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” -Michelangelo
The ants on an ant colony are having a radically different experience than the scientist observing them. Who has the advantage? Who has the most intel, the most data? Who has a bigger arsenal of information?
(The way the word “information” is used here is not just referring to reference-able facts and knowledge. Information is energy. Energy is “data.” This could be knowledge or intel, but it can also be emotions, stimuli, senses, thoughts, observations, etc.)
On the outside, collective energy may look “active.” Everyone during the holidays is rushing around, gathering in groups, partaking in a massive ritual that many people perform blindly, with little to no deeply personalized intent.
Amid the forged energy of giving, togetherness, gratitude, love and celebration, which is a nice reprieve from soulless obligations no matter how reluctant its reception, there is still an energy of obligation— which some may take dutiful pride in fulfilling, others may not.
There’s a question here of the efficacy of a collective ritual if a high volume of participants are doing it apathetically, if not begrudgingly.
When you are isolated during these times, your energy is all your own. The free time belongs to you. The empty streets on Christmas eve belong to you. Your thoughts belong to you— they always belong to you, don’t they?— but in this way, with everyone’s attention elsewhere, your thoughts are more unfettered. You don’t have to “fight” the energy of other people’s energetic presence or input.
Anything else you focus on that isn’t the “current thing” belongs to you. You can draw all the energy you want from it. You can think freely about it, and allow your mind to ponder and wander, without judgment, without rush, without pressure. That reserve of free, wild, unconfined energy gives you an advantage, because in that energy is the opportunity for new insight. That’s how new connections are made in the mind. That’s how parts of the brain light up that have never lit up before.
That’s not to say this doesn’t happen when you’re in the mix among the general population. You’re always learning, making connections, drawing in energy, forming new ideas, no matter how arbitrary or routine your choices and interactions may seem.
When this is done in solitude— the “true” solitude being referred to here, where not only are you isolated within yourself, but your energy is contrary to the collective, like it is at 4am— this is where you get the chance to discover your most default, authentic self.
The holidays, as well as midnights and weekends, offer a rare moment to reclaim space. Especially when you are given the invitation to isolation, whether it is voluntary or involuntary.
Imagine the energy of the crowd as a thunderous rain cloud, and it has moved away from you. You may think isolation is a curse, but if you learn how to harness the energy that surrounds you, and you furthermore learn how to discern the quality of that energy (in the same way you would test a tangible substance for its purity), you won’t be missing out on the chaotic electricity of the crowd— rather, you’ll be recharging, resetting, and reclaiming your own power.
Be on the lookout for the secret doors through which you will find the world where you are at your most supreme. Through that door you can create a place where there can be no contention, no enmity, no discord. What you learn behind that door, you can take with you wherever you go, and it can never be taken away from you, or accessed by anyone else. One of those secret doors is these “perfect isolations”— where everyone else’s energy and attention is so concentrated in one place that it’s easier than ever to find unclaimed territory.
Find the magic that is missed by the sleeping crowd.