New Years; Depression or Jubilee or Both

This is really good to talk about all year long. New Year's just brings the matter into bright light. How we are "supposed" to feel and how we really feel are often two different matters altogether.

Many folks suffer great depression during the "Holidays". Many folks fake it as though they are as happy as can be. Still others are as happy as they can be. Probably most of us are somewhere in between and bouncing between extremes. Let us look at the one scenario that is complicated but normal this time of year. You are bouncing with joy and all excited for the holidays, all things for Christmas went well and a beginning relationship is looking promising. But your friend is alone for the holidays and is in the middle of a nasty divorce. Well the question is; which one of you is going to fake it when you are together? It would be nice to think all things are just rosy and that the upbeat feelings of one can bring the other up to a better level. But the truth is that sometimes we just have the blues and happy will just irritate us. And so it is that we empathize and share in some low down.

The good news is that that does not have to bring us down. We can stay constant in our good feelings.

Whichever way you are feeling, you have permission to feel that way. And know this, that sometimes the fluctuations can happen in just a moment's time. And appreciating them must happen in just that amount of time.

I would love to tell you that all depression is bad and that we must always try to climb out of it in a hurry. But that just is not real. "let me be blue, thank you very much", is a fair enough cry out. Sometimes we just have to get down and out. Sometimes we need to feel the pain in order to find the gain.

In my life I know one thing for certain: I have needed times of trouble to make me appreciate times of good. There is no more of a quick way to get a person closer to the spiritual than to give them pain in the day to day empirical. A heart that has never been broken does not know the release of the mend. We are not designed to be perfect. And so it just follows that life is not designed to always be perfect. We are to succumb from time to time to the wasteland of depressions. Especially during this holiday time of the year we may suffer melancholy. We may just be sad. Let it be, let it be.

(please note with care that I do not speak of a clinical depression for that is a whole other matter together and deserves our great attention to help to cure as soon as is practical)

Other times during this season we feel filled with jubilation and celebration and this we must embrace also. If we are in the mood we should not miss one opportunity to dance. We must dance to the rhythms of love and of joy. We must reflect kindly of days past and yet embrace the beauty of promises yet fulfilled. We must bring in a new year but at the same time dance and sing like there is no tomorrow. It is in this time that we must store up new memories and recreate old ones into positive and form the dreams of tomorrow into beauty and wonder. Now is when to assess our great accomplishments of yesteryear and pat our selves on the back.

It is important to take stock when we are on the upswing and be charitable to ourselves. Lest we do them in the low times and beat our selves up. You see when we are positive we can store up enough of the good to get us through the bad. We literally can fill our reservoir full of the good and drink of it when times are tough.

It is not that gaiety is lost and it is not that depression is conquered. They just somehow seem to melt into one. The highs and the lows become a constant. The man sat with his tea in front of the fireplace warming himself, he sat alone and he was at peace. But inside was he sad or was he jubilant? You see at some point he came to realize that those two impostors were just different sides of the same coin. Do not get me wrong there is still great joy to be had and there is still great pain to be felt. The difference is that through both now he is satisfied to sit and contemplate and fined the good in both.

For our man the holidays will be filled with the emotions of greatness and sadness. And he would not have it any other way.

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