Midlife Meditation

Oh, how I hate Christmas. What's this, you say? You hate the most wonderful time of the year? You hate the time of Peace on Earth, Good Will to All, God bless us everyone, merriness and good cheer, lifting up the meek and the lowly, fa la la la la la la la la.... Well, no. Not exactly. All right, not at all. And yet, oh, how I hate it. Sensing some conflict here? Good. Because I'm loaded with  it--not unlike the season of Christmas, as observed in these United States of America. In fact, I've got a lifetime's worth of joys and concerns, complaints and plaudits, raptures and regrets, heart and spleen aching to be vented. Good thing I've got a blog. I have decided to make December the month of Christmas. And yes, I'm aware that, outside of this blog, it already is. But back to me. I'm dedicating my blog this month to taking apart Christmas: the pluses, the minuses, the excesses, the recesses, the blessings and abominations and exploitations and neg...

You know the story of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," but I'm going to retell it anyway: Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly moneychanger, is visited on Christmas Eve by four ghosts: his deceased partner, Jacob Marley, who warns him that his stinginess will doom him to a life and afterlife of loneliness and pain; the ghost of Christmas past, who shows him through a montage of memories how he became the man he is; the ghost of Christmas present, who shows him how some are rejoicing at Christmas, while others suffer, all of them grieving or berating the coldness of his heart; and the ghost of Christmas future, a silent specter who shows him how little time he has left, and what a miserable end he will come to, due to his solitary selfishness. The shock of the experience changes him into a man of love and generosity, and both he and the world are better for the transformation. It's been told and retold, performed on stage, filmed, animated, digitized, updated, g...