A Science Writer’s Winter Solstice
My drawing of an Xmas tree in Hoboken, where I moved after getting divorced.
HO-HO-HOBOKEN, DECEMBER 18, 2024. Below is a tweaked version of an essay I wrote for the NY Times in 2002, when I was married and living in Garrison, N.Y.
Several years ago, my wife decided that our family should celebrate winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. To be honest, I wasn't eager to cram another event into our frantic holiday schedule. As a lapsed Catholic, I also have a knee-jerk aversion toward rituals and other trappings of religion.
Nevertheless, an hour or so after nightfall on December 21, I dutifully pulled on my coat and boots and tramped into a field bordering our property. Near a clump of skeletal trees, I found a circle of stones enclosing a heap of sticks gathered by my wife and kids earlier that day. With a chunk of artificial kindling and a dozen matches, I got the sticks burning as three lanterns came bobbing toward me.
We stayed outside for only half an hour or so. The night was thumpingly cold, and smoke kept blowing in our faces. My six-year-old son Mac and four-year-old daughter Skye preferred poking the fire with sticks to listening to their parents’ half-assed stories about the Man in the Moon and other celestial beings. Skye singed her hair, and the tip of her mitten melted. Glancing up at the moon and stars, I felt…
Actually, no word captures the feeling, but wonder suffices. As a science journalist, I know that scientists don’t have a clue how our universe came into being, or why it took this particular form out of an infinitude of possibilities, including nonexistence. Nor does anyone know how inanimate matter on our little planet coalesced into living creatures, let alone creatures that could invent reality TV. Science, you might say, has discovered that our existence is infinitely improbable, and hence a miracle.
It is one thing to know intellectually that life is a miracle. It is quite another to see it. Saints and poets aside, most of us rarely do. Psychiatrist Arthur Deikman blames our pinched perception on two innate tendencies: instrumentality and automatization. Instrumentality is our compulsion to view the world through the filter of our selfish interests. Automatization is our propensity to learn tasks so thoroughly that we perform them with little or no conscious thought.
These traits have helped our species survive. Automatization, for example, allows us to carry out more than one task at the same time. We can fret over our plummeting stock portfolios while driving our children to their school Christmas concert. The downside of instrumentality and automatization is that we sleepwalk through life.
Yet now and then, we stop seeing the world as something to be manipulated for our ends. We simply see it, undistorted by our fears and desires. This form of perception, which Deikman calls deautomatization, is the goal of contemplative traditions.
When an aspirant asked the 15th-century Zen master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of “the highest wisdom,” Ikkyu wrote one word: “Attention.” The dissatisfied aspirant asked, “Is that all?” Ikkyu responded by writing: “Attention. Attention.”
Spiritual practices such as meditation, yoga and prayer can help us pay attention. So can art, poetry and music. And so can religious rituals. This, perhaps, is why many areligious folk celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah. We especially need these rituals in this most benighted of seasons, when we are prone to dwelling on life's darker aspects.
Christianity and other faiths are haunted by the problem of evil: If a loving God created us, why is life often so cruel? But sitting with my wife and kids in that circle of stones on winter solstice helped me see that birth, beauty, love and laughter also pose a problem. If there is no God, and we are here through sheer happenstance, why is life so wonderful? It’s a mystery, which no theory or theology can dispel.
My family celebrates winter solstice in that field every year now. After we return home and shed our boots and coats, we sit on the couch and flip through an album of photos taken by my wife during the year. Each photo triggers memories: Remember when we visited Grandpa in Colorado, and Mac learned to snowboard and Skye got sick? Remember Harley the starling, who pestered the other birds in the aviary so much that Mommy brought him in the house, where Harley drove Daddy crazy?
Mac and Skye might squabble over who gets to turn the pages of the photo album. I might brood over a deadline or plot how to ditch the family to play pond hockey tomorrow. But for at least a moment, I'll pay attention and see. I’ll be flooded with wonder and gratitude, even though I won't know whom or what to thank.
Further Reading:
Decorating a Tree with Skye: A Christmas Story
Quantum Mechanics and the Holiday Blues
Entropy, Meaninglessness and Miracles
Nicaragua, Quantum Mechanics and Other “Solutions” to Habituation
Drawing Pretty Pictures in Troubled Times
My pal Richard Gaylord writes: Before 1969 my twin sister and I were told our birthday was December 20th. Our father forged the false date on our birth certificates so we met the deadline for kindergarten in Buffalo, where we lived at the time. He thought if my mother had to keep us home for another year, she’d go nuts. Then during the Vietnam War draft lottery in 1969, the lottery position for the December 20th birthdate was in the low twenties, and my father revealed that I was actually born on December 21st. But the draft lottery position for the 21st was even worse than for the 20th; it was 9th. Anyway half my legal documents say I was born on the 20th and half say I was born on the 21st.