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Someone else who is just as unwilling as I am to get out of
bed on these dim and dark winter mornings.
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I’ve been reflecting on the other 354 days of this year that
have passed. I suppose 2015 for me will be known as “The Year of the Great
Weakening”. I’ve come to face to face with working through a lot of denial
about how much of a toll last year’s suffering really took on me, and what kind
of impact it has left, and how it still affects me today. I didn’t think it
would have amounted to affecting me so chronically. I’m sick of realizing how
much it all has physically aged me in such a (relatively) short while: a
notable and pronounced loss of resilience. I re-entered work this year with not
only lots of upheavals regarding my personal health, but also wading hip deep
into problems and challenges affecting not only me, but my co-workers and
people I serve, and with my role in the Union. Holiday plans were ruined by
fires throughout the summer, more injuries through late summer and fall, and
then the other tragedies pouring through the news from late October onward. It
hasn’t been what I would call a fun year to say the least.
Sure, there were lots of hard lessons to learn, but I didn’t
need the pain, stress, and anguish; I’d benefit more from them if some element
of fun or a lighter side was present. That didn’t happen. Life became too
serious for my liking; nothing I’d want write about. It has been bad enough that
I decided to suspend my more analytical and logical modality of problem solving
thinking recently. It has been helpful in guiding out of problems, or at least
taming down sparks to prevent bonfires, but there has been nothing that I would
call feeling better with a sense of satisfaction or interest in doing so. So, just
on a whim while Christmas shopping for others, I thought I would seek out a
small inexpensive something that I would identify with as a “lucky charm”** for
a more acceptably benign form of exercising superstitious thinking for myself:
by consulting some form of oracle. I realized that the perfect sort of rosary
objects or gris-gris for me is a set
of dice. My threads of “logic” for making them significant totem objects are as
follows:
I like simple and symmetrical geometric shapes;
dice have that going for them. It’s a reminder to seek out the most fundamental
and simplest solution to a problem first and to take a balanced approach to tackling it.
- Dice are linked to gaming (my favourite dice games are Backgammon and Yahtzee, which I’m becoming addicted to playing online); a reminder to try to find some way to approach a difficult situation by making it entertaining enough to keep it at least interesting to follow through with dealing with it.
- Often my biggest problem is analyzing too much, and slapping down too many options and approaches in my own private sessions of brainstorming. Paralysis by analysis happens too frequently. Dice would be practical tools to help me speed up decision making and to settle on single options.
- Dice are mathematical instruments, which appeals to me when I want to entertain that geeky side of myself. I mentally retreat sometimes into thinking about the world weighed and measured in numbers to help myself be less bored or depressed.
Most importantly, a six sided die is a mnemonic representation
of all the dimensions and elements of what depression or boredom is, or their
flipside. Boredom = (energy) – (interest) – (attitude) – (knowledge) –
(imagination) – (focus). By default of existing, one has a physical mass that
works and interacts within the dimension of time. That is Energy (remember E=mc2).
Unless you are in a freaking coma, or sick to a point close to dying, the
powers that be gifted your conscious self with some physical/mental abilities
to use for the waking hours of your day, and the choice of how, or whether or
not, to use them for your and/or others’ benefit. How present or absent the
other five factors are that play on your energy will dictate how bored you will
or will not become. It’s even hard talk about, or write out what boredom is and
to somehow make it a subject of serious interest. That is until you see what
happens when you add plus signs to all of those variables following energy. Then
what you have is its complete opposite: creativity. If you have little or none
of those things in that set, you simply have to get real and honestly ask
yourself why those variables are depleted, or outright absent, for each or
every one of them; that keep you shackled to a mindset of boredom, and impedes
your approach to something more creative.
If I were to create an official national holiday marking
winter solstice in this land, the celebrations would include a lot of dice
based games, candles/lights/fire to brighten things up, and of course drinking.
There would be no obligation to exchange gifts; just share good company. Sounds
like a good start anyway. Who knows, if Trudeau the Younger ends up legalizing
marijuana, the trend might naturally flow to there being a reversion to some
more hippie neopagan-esque celebrations that would mirror
things like this anyway.
An addendum paragraph to this entry the day after. The
question about what my plan for 2016 was brought up to me by a friend over
lunch hour. I was lacking in speculation and answers. It may involve more of what
rolls of the dice have to tell me. If they break horrid spells of indecision
and, if I gain a course of action and commitment from using them, it is all fair
game.
*- I always wondered why we haven’t made more generic holidays
and celebrations here in this nation for both solstice dates of the year, like
they do at least for the Summer Solstice in Scandinavia. We are multicultural
society in Canada, and we all live under the same sun. It wouldn't then matter who you
were racially, ethnically, culturally, spiritually (or not). It would be
somewhat uniting I’d think. I’ll always welcome another statutory holiday.
**- If you want to get judgemental and think that this is all
very silly, let me remind you readers that people use such symbols, charms, and trinkets
all the time, and it is more common than you wish to acknowledge. It usually
comes and is possessed in the form of jewelry. Think about the multibillion
dollar industry happening alone just for the sake of procuring an outrageously
expensive shiny rock affixed to a ring just to show off and symbolize engagement or marriage.
Others get more and extreme and tap ink into their skin permanently to express
their totem symbols in tattoo form on impulsive whims (which they may regret
later). Surely, my choice is no weirder or more extreme than any of those
things.
