Peace on Earth
Dec 16th, 2007 by Kathy
I am sitting in my bed, late on a Sunday morning, eating cookies that Jill and the kids and I made last night. We played dorky Christmas music, half-decorated the tree and turned off the XBox 360. To top it off I forced the others to watch “It’s A Wonderful Life” in the hopes that, in later years, they’ll remember the tradition fondly.
The four of us crowded into my small kitchen, annoyed each other with our physical presence, navigated through the dishes and the oven door and the array of ingredients, fried the mixer, discussed the relative risks of salmonella poisoning and stepped over the dog who insisted on taking a nap on 60% of the floor space.
The night was not without sarcasm or attitude; the Kodak moment was populated with moving human beings, after all, not pretty moments frozen in time. And at the same time it was rich with smells and sweets and the orchestrations of family.
I am drowning at my day job these days — a place of anything but peace on earth — which has been keeping me away from almost all things wholesome and sane, like this blog, like the good parts of the season, like any kind of creative work. On mornings I don’t have the kids, I go in at 7:30 and on nights I don’t have them I come back between 10 and midnight. The best I’ve been doing to keep it together is walking the dog every morning around 5:30 and getting in about 20 minutes of meditation most of the days during the week.
So to have a weekend where we actually had some time to “do Christmas” was a pretty sweet discovery. We would have time to get a tree and trim it, and I envisioned tender moments and memories being forged with me and the kids. Then Jill mentioned that G was going to be busy all weekend and if I wanted to do anything, and wanted to include her, let her know.
I was a little stuck. Do I share our tree-trimming moment with someone else or do I hug that morsel of grace time to be just between me and the boys? If I added someone else into the mix, would it become a girlfriend fest with the kids off in the other room watching TV? It wasn’t that I didn’t want her in the picture. It was a question of whether I wanted anyone in the picture.
And then this peace on earth phrase bubbled up in my mind. Peace on earth, goodwill to men. And women. And kids. And ex-spouse’s wives. And… bosses (I guess). And… presidents (we’re stretching here, but, OK, in theory I guess it’s possible). Peace on earth. Why the hell would I not want to share that moment with someone? Yes, it adds to the complexity, changes the dynamic… but it also adds to the richness as well.
With someone else, I could bake cookies as well as trim the tree. With someone else, we could add the smell of ginger and cloves to the aroma of the pine. I would have company in cadging bits of cookie dough and watching an old movie and trading off trips to the oven to check on the baking progress. We could have more, with the complexity, rather than less.
So I asked her to come over and the evening was about fifty times better than if I’d hogged it to myself. I had a girlfriend with whom to fuss in the kitchen and I had a co-parent to reality check the kids’ assertion that watching a black and white movie was cruel and unusual punishment. (Even though Jill had never liked It’s a Wonderful Life herself — her comment was, gosh, if he was so unhappy he should’ve just gone and taken a class or something — she tried it again and her enjoyment enabled the kids to relax a hair and grant that OK, MOM, it’s maybe not THAT bad.)
We all have that bit of Jimmy Stewart in us. That part that wants to shake the dust of this crummy little town off our feet and go see the world. People entrap us, though. Love entraps us. Families entrap us. Kids entrap us. And yet it’s so obvious that it’s those entrapping things that are the world. That make our lives so rich and full.
Life is very easy when there’s no one around. Peace becomes exponentially more complex the more variables you add to the equation. When you add more people into your life, you get more of everything — more laughter and more tears, more shared memories and more bodies to navigate around.
So my tip for the holiday season includes letting all that stuff in, to the extent you are able. Maybe “peace” is not all slumbering babes and cold starlit nights. Maybe peace takes the form of stepping over the dog and telling your kids that they’re going to sit there and enjoy the goddamn movie or the electronics are off for a month. (For the records, I did not go that far.) Maybe peace involves a few extra trips to the store. Maybe peace involves complexity and clamor and negotiation. Whatever form it takes, it’s better to embrace than to recoil, to open up rather than to insulate.
Peace on earth does not come easily. It does not come quickly. And it does not come naturally. It is not constant, and, once achieved, it is hard to maintain.
Like love, peace in our lives is something that feels more like an act of grace than a state of being. But, like love, it comes in different flavors. And, like love, I can’t imagine living a life without peace as something to be held up as something to seek … a beautiful, ephemeral, joyful chaos.
I can smell the cookies from here………yum!
Yeah, like a wood working class — something creative. (Which probably sounds pretty dorky, but I do think the idea has some merit!) But I did like this movie much better this time through. Somehow, watching it together gave me a new appreciation for it. Plus I think last time I watched it I might have been a teenager — I may not have been quite ready for it to captivate me yet. Thanks — that was a fun night.
Just found out that X is attempting to put a restraining order on my podcasts….so I thought I would reread Kathy’s Peace on Earth entry to keep my anger at bay…..
That’s too bad. It’s way, way better to let you have your voice instead of struggling against it, and to accept that your perspective is going to be different from his.