Advent meditation

Anthony Wilson, ,

A pink bag full of rolls of wrapping paper hangs from the door handle of an upstairs room

I like to think of myself as a pretty consistent person. I look askance with a certain smugness at the behaviour, private and public, of certain prime ministers and presidents, confident that I am nothing like them in the way they say one thing and do another, their glaring, almost comical U-turns.

Christmas, specifically the waiting season of Advent, puts paid to my feelings of superiority.

Here are some of the things I have heard myself say during the last few Christmases:

I love Christmas.

I’ll be glad when it’s all over.

I hate Christmas music.

I can’t wait to shut the door on the whole world.

I’ve made you a Christmas playlist!

Why do we have to see them?

I don’t want anything.

You know we should go, it’ll be fun.

I wish I had a river I could skate away on.

That book would be nice.

Can’t we just skip it this year?

As you can see, quite a mass of contradictions and strong feelings, some or all of which, like a politician’s soundbite, may have been true at the time but which look like poor excuses when exposed in the daylight.

I am all of the people who said these things.

Like wearing my coat and hat indoors, like bringing a tree into my living space, like eating big meals at the wrong time of day, like speaking and writing to forgotten relatives, like listening to other people’s music, like a World Cup at the wrong time of the year, like a baby born to the wrong family, Christmas, the thing I love/hate/can’t wait for/want to skip/can’t do without, comes to me dressed in unfamiliar clothes, disrupts my life and my complacency and holds a steady mirror to my consistent inconsistency.

Published by Anthony Wilson

I am a lecturer, poet and writing tutor. I work in teacher and medical education at the University of Exeter. My anthology Lifesaving Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. In 2012 I published Riddance (Worple Press), a collection of poems, and Love for Now (Impress Books), a memoir, about my experience of cancer. My most recent books are Deck Shoes (Impress Books, 2019), a book of prose memoir and criticism, and The Afterlife (Worple Press, 2019). In 2023 I will publish The Wind and the Rain, my sixth collection of poems, with Blue Diode Press. My current research project, with Sue Dymoke from Nottingham Trent University and funded by the Foyle Foundation, is Young Poets' Stories: https://youngpoetsstories.com/. This blog is archived by the British Library.

12 Comments

  5. Oh, Anthony, how well you have written about these odd feelings at this time of the year. Putting up the tree one moment and weeping the next. Trying to understand “Why?” Your fine words have given me much-needed insight into the answer to that.
    Thank you…Happy (or weepy) holidays, whatever feels right.
    Molly

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  6. Somebody beat me to the Whitman quote but yes that! I suspect it’s the reason why you and your writing are so important and loved by so many people. Than you

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.