‘Tis the Season Part 3: The Holiday Blues

Note: This is Part 3 of a series looking at some of the issues we wrestle with in the middle of the holiday season and the end of the year. You can read Part 1 here. Part 2 here.

This time of year, holiday joy grabs all the headlines. Holiday funk gets buried on page 5.

We know intellectually that holiday movies are just movies and that in real life not every family reunion is happy, but we still get sucked in to making comparisons between Hallmark’s dreams and our question mark reality.

There’s no logical reason that the end of the 31st day of the month in the 12th month of the year should be any more consequential than the end of any other day or week or month. But enough people hear it often enough that suicides peak on New Year’s Day.

Depression has a documented link to lack of sunlight.

There are very real psychological and physiological consequences to the reduced exercise and sunlight we typically get during winter (there’s an actual name for the winter blues – Seasonal Affective Disorder).

Finally, the free time associated with the holidays sometimes gives us more space to feel the pain of wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and Syria. To worry about climate change or loss of personal freedom. To dwell on painful, debilitating aches, pains, health concerns, fracturing relationships or isolation.

You may have some of those same symptoms.

My holiday blues every year seem to center around regrets about my selfishness -- the kindness and generosity I haven’t shown to others.

I consistently second-guess what I am doing with my life, and wondering what my highest and best use is – to my family, my friends, my community, the larger world. And around every year end, I find myself chugging down a depressing track on a sort of grand funk railroad.

Whatever your version of seasonal funk might be, I think you might be inspired by a few words and thoughts from… Alexei Navalny.

Navalny is the Russian dissident who dared to call out Vladimir Putin and his country’s corruption. In repayment, he was first poisoned, then sentenced to what would turn out to be life in prison in a cold, dingy prison in Siberia. He died there earlier this year under suspicious circumstances, but not before writing a series of meditations, including some important words on how he stood up to depression and suffering.

Here are two big, simple ideas from him that have resonated with me over the past couple of weeks.

Alexei Navalny’s posthumous memoir from prison excoriates the current Russian regime, and offers some inspirational words for those facing difficult times.

Imagine the worst

As if the subzero isolation of his Siberian prison, a psychotic next-cell neighbor and mindless marathons of ice shoveling and machine work weren’t enough, Navalny faced a near-total information vacuum about his long-term fate while in prison. His approach? He forced himself to imagine the worst possible outcome of his situation. For him, the worst was that he would never be freed from prison and would die there, apart from his family, with the Putin regime still in power. In his memoir, he writes that he told his wife all this during her visit to him in the prison. She immediately agreed.

“At that moment I wanted to seize her in my arms and hug her joyfully, as hard as I could. That was so great! No tears! It was one of those moments when you realize you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you.”

Then he says this to his wife:

“Let’s just decide for ourselves that this is most likely what’s going to happen. Let’s accept it as the base scenario and arrange our lives on that basis. If things turn out better, that will be marvellous, but we won’t count on it or have ill-founded hopes.”

Navalny admits that there is “a hint of trickery and self-deception in all this.” You can’t help hoping the worst won’t come. But by speaking his worst fear out loud and facing it, Navalny was better prepared for the series of disappointments he faced.

 See the really big picture

The other thing that Navalny says helped him in prison was his ability to see beyond his current troubles. No matter how bad his fate looked, his Christian faith told him there was a form of existence beyond his current life.

“It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert once lived to eight hundred years old, or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about?... Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself.”

His job, he wrote, was to “seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else...they will take my punches for me.”

Even though both of these epiphanies gave Navalny perspective and comfort, they didn’t make him stop trying. He continued to write and rail against the Putin regime. His attorneys continued to fight for his release right up to his death in February 2024.

It’s an inspiring, tragic story, and there’s one other obvious lesson from it: there ain’t nothing happening in my life in the same zip code as what happened to Navalny. My blessing/suffering ratio is high.

It’s time for me to learn from his example and launch my own fight against the much-less-justified funk I find myself in.

·      I need to be intentional about finding new small groups and organizations to join;

·      I need to give more time and treasure to friends and strangers;

·      And I need to find a new cause. It won’t be and doesn’t need to be as big as Navalny’s cause, but it will be something.

A goal for the New Year: learn to face down my biggest worries and believe what I say I believe in.

And in the meantime I need to learn from Navalny’s thought experiment. I can lower anxiety by facing the possibility of the worst case scenario and I can find comfort by actually believing what my faith teaches me.

Notes:

Seasonal Affective Disorder is a real thing: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/seasonal-affective-disorder#:~:text=If%20you%20have%20noticed%20significant,pattern%20SAD%20or%20winter%20depression.

Current wars across the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts

I read excerpts from Navalny’s book in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/alexei-navalny-patriot-memoir

You can find the book, Patriot: A Memoir, based on his letters, here: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=alexey+navalny+book&hvadid=719640455901&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9198929&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=6532450524201596223&hvtargid=kwd-2398243897164&hydadcr=22098_13323293&tag=googhydr-20&ref=pd_sl_pa64gsrb1_e

Navalny’s suspicious death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_funeral_of_Alexei_Navalny#:~:text=On%2016%20February%202024%2C%20at,3%2C%20in%20the%20village%20of

Using mirrors to improve winter SAD: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/02/a-norwegian-town-found-a-way-to-fight-the-winter-blues-using-giant-mirrors