I hope you all had a great Christmas, and those of you lucky enough not to have to get straight back to work are enjoying this period of ‘Merryneum’. It’s a strange time in the calendar between Christmas and new year where the nation goes into some sort of weird parallel universe, lamenting the loss of excitement of Christmas but with trepidation of what the new year brings. My daughter calls it ChrimboLimbo. Some choose to fill the void with retail therapy, others fill it with TV binging. Then there are folk like me that really relish the unplugged feeling that time has somehow stopped in a Matrix style sequence where the film pauses, but you can still move around in some sort of new found freedom with more time to take in the view.
Literally at the turning of the day from Halloween, the shops were filled with Christmas fayre and now it’s barely hours before every supermarket in Britain will be unveiling their Easter offerings. Literally no one needs this except the shareholders of retail empires.. We are brain-washed into thinking it is necessary to spend 2 or 3 months preparing for something that lasts 2 days and it’s almost impossible for any of that actual reality to live up expectations. What we hope might happen is some sort of perfect yuletide experience of a lifetime, all rolled into a ‘best bits of Christmas’ compilation album. We put ourselves under ridiculous pressure to either put on the best show or make the best of someone else’s.
I love Christmas but I think I’d enjoy it even more if I wasn’t constantly being fed expectations over an extended period of how it should be. I guess this is what the ancients would describe as failing to live in the moment. In our efforts to plan the perfect time, we’ve completely missed the experience and the point. I think this is why I particularly enjoy the Merryneum. There are literally no expectations of what I should do, what the outcome should be, or whether even anything productive should result. It’s brilliant when something does, but equally I don’t feel too guilty when nothing happens at all, and I can spend quality time doing nothing. It’s kind of a Daoist principle. Once you get out of the way or more pertinently, remove your expectations of what should or shouldn’t be done, life flows. Often when relieved of any pressure to achieve anything, some of my best creative thinking comes out, music, lyrics, concepts, life changing revelations, crazy plans for the future and nostalgic trips back to past times. I’ve been rewarded this time with the practical inspiration to build the mother of all garage workbenches and will hopefully get in a lot more reading time, something I’ve massively neglected. Whatever you do, I’d urge you not to feel guilty about some notion that it’s a waste of time. Let your mind go where it needs to be. All the doors leading to exciting places, are on the wall not in the middle of the room, and sometimes we can’t see the exits because of all the furniture…