'Tis the season for madness

Amen.

I love summer but I don’t seem to fare well during the festive season. In the Southern Hemisphere summer coincides with Christmas, end-of-year celebrations, school holidays, and the beginning of a new year. I try to imagine the benefits of Christmas in the Northern Hemisphere. I guess it would give the shorter days and cooler winter period a boost of activity, a distraction — rather than wrapping up a great deal of the excitement for the year into one season. Santa and snow, roaring fires, mulled wine, traditional roasts, and plum pudding seem more dignified somehow than our Australian version of Christmas Day. Casual backyard events ‘drinking white wine in the sun’ (thank you Tim Minchin) can sometimes be a recipe for headaches and other disasters.

Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash

It’s now less than two weeks until Christmas and it’s mad outside — and windy. Traffic is chaotic with everyone going to the shops, Christmas parties, various other end-of-year occasions, or just trying to go about their regular business. Drivers are impatient. There’s more agro on the roads … drivers cutting in, horn blowing, middle finger raising. My friend Kerry and I were out walking last weekend. We chatted at a busy intersection in North Hobart as we waited for the green flashing ‘Walk’ sign to come on. When it did and we were halfway across the road, a car sped by, the driver shouting something indecipherable at us. ‘What was that about?’ I asked Kerry. ‘He must have thought we were walking too slowly,’ she replied.

This week Alan and I went away for a couple of nights up north. There had been a lot of tension in the extended family and we were feeling a need for some downtime before the big Christmas Day event we will be hosting at our place. We had just left home and were driving on the main road out of Kingston when an SUV vehicle ahead of us stopped, seemingly stalled or broken down at the entrance to the first roundabout before the main exit to Hobart.

‘Darn,’ I thought. ‘This is going to hold us up — there’s no way anyone can drive past a car broken down there.’

We watched as the driver’s door of the car opened and a youngish woman jumped out leaving her car door wide open. I wondered if there was some sort of hazard in the car — had a child or a dog jumped out?’ (I remembered once leaping out of a car around the Bilgola Bends in Sydney when a huge spider jumped off the inside windscreen onto my lap.) The woman crossed the cement barrier in the middle of the road and began waving her arms at the oncoming traffic. It was a puzzling scenario before all became clear. Crossing the road was a mother duck with three tiny ducklings trailing behind. What a brave thing for the woman to do — to stop her car in a stream of traffic and give her every effort to save mother and baby ducks. I felt guilty for having felt annoyed. The woman ran back to her car, not looking back at any of the cars or the people in them, before starting up her car and driving on.

Later that day at our Bridport cabin looking out over Anderson Bay I reflected on the woman who had stopped the traffic. I realised that I too, just a few days before, had stopped traffic. I was in the city when I received a phone call with some very disturbing news about a grandchild. I volunteered to go immediately to check out the situation and rushed back to the carpark … so panicked about the news I forgot to pay my car parking ticket on the ground floor. Of course, at the car park exit the exit barrier wouldn’t go up. I saw there were cars banked up behind me and dissolved into tears. (To give this some context I rarely cry but if I do it is always in the two weeks before Christmas.) It seemed appropriate to push the Help button. A car park attendant employer appeared and asked me to put my hazard lights on before reversing my car and parking it to the side. I had no idea where the hazard lights were in my car and this undid me further. More tears. The man probably concluded I was incapable of calmly remedying the situation. He raised the exit barrier and walked away. I know I looked like a mad woman.

I won’t go into the family drama that precipitated this. It’s messy as family dramas always are and at its core comes down to opposing views by divorced parents about matters to do with children. Despite my best intentions, I don’t think anything I said or did helped the situation. It’s complicated.

Why is there so much conflict everywhere???

On Substack, American writers who voted for Kamala Harris are expressing trepidation about spending Christmas with Trump-supporting family members. On the radio, I listen to news reports and commentary from both sides on the devastating situations between Israel and Palestine, and Russia and Ukraine. It is sometimes hard for someone living so far away to work out whose point of view is the most valid. Here in Australia, I am dismayed that the leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, has just made an election pledge to remove Indigenous flags from official events and to take down the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags from Sydney Harbour Bridge … more divisive leadership bound to create more conflict.

And yes, I’m not feeling very jolly right now. I feel sad about the state of the world and the situation in my family. I feel defeated. I am hoping my emotions will return to some sort of ‘normal’ after the festive period is over. I will continue writing intentions every day and reading my dear friend Kerry Howell’s latest post. It is phenomenal and life-saving. In the meantime, God bless duck-saving women.

"Please create something good every day, and don't destroy anything"

Read also Lou Cunnigham’s latest post about how nature fuels the soul.

My Happy Place

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