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Magazine
The Shrinking Universe
Cups o’ kindness
VIJAY NAGASWAMI
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It’s the time for ritual celebrations and resolutions. We’d do better to dig into our reserves and come up with quarts of kindness instead.
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Photo: P. V. Sivakumar
A different kind of stress: The pressure to party.
It’s that time of the year again when one has just done the “looking-back-at-the-year-gone-by-looking-forward-at-the-year-to-come” routine, when editors ask their columnists to review the previous year and make predictions for the ensuing year (which fortunately, my editor hasn’t done, thereby earning you a bit of a reprieve) and when there’s a general air of hope that the annus horribilis is finally over (and 2008, at least the last few months of it, has been a horrible annus). It’s also that time of the year when even the sanest of urban people are recovering from what I refer to as the Auld Lang Syne Syndrome.
The first component of this syndrome is compulsive gaiety. Since ‘tis the season to be jolly, everyone is jolly well determined to be jolly. You would have seen it even on the streets. Even as there was a certain joy experienced in wishing perfect strangers a happy new year at the stroke of midnight on December 31, this amity has not extended itself to the subsequent days and has probably disappeared by now. And, if accosted today by the aforementioned strangers, there is little recognition of the individuals let alone any residual camaraderie. The same auto-rickshaw drivers who were victims of one’s bonhomie and good cheer are back to being at the receiving end of one’s road rage. Closely linked to compulsive gaiety is the second symptom: celebration anxiety. The buzz on everybody’s lips for the week (sometimes even the month) preceding New Year’s Day is “what are you doing for new year’s eve?” The need to be invited to a party or to have booked places for a “commercial party” at a starred hotel or to go to another city to bring in the new year is so strong that people who had not made their plans by say, the middle of December or so, would have experienced a certain anxiety accompanied by a bit of depression as well.
Yearly ritual
And the third element of the Auld Lang Syne Syndrome is that extraordinary phenomenon called the New Year Resolution. We have vowed to ourselves and our loved ones that, come January 1, we will turn over a new leaf, we will give up our sins and vices and concentrate on getting back on the straight and narrow, we will never invest in the stock market again without telling our spouses and so forth. There are of course, the more resolute among us, who will actually keep their resolutions and march forward to conquer new frontiers and the like, but the fair majority usually cop out within a few weeks, if they have not already done so, and resolve never to make new year resolutions again, until the next new year’s eve rolls around. So what is it about January 1 that makes us do such extraordinary things? Why all the fuss? If you’re still reading this, chances are that you might have, if not this time, at least some time in the recallable past, experienced one or more of the three symptoms of the Auld Lang Syne Syndrome, as of course, would most urbanised individuals in our country.
Actually the Auld Lang Syne syndrome has, to a large extent, to do with our lifestyles. Let’s first take a look at the new year resolution thing. The inescapable conclusion that one can come to in the face of millions of abandoned resolutions is that one enjoys the vice too much to want to give it up. However, at some level, one does feel the need to give it up, as a result of which the individual faces a classic approach-avoidance conflict. The heart says, “don’t give it up” and the head says, “you must change the situation”. And eventually, as it usually does, the heart emerges the winner. But before this, one goes through the motions of assuaging one’s head by setting a deadline and making a resolution, which seems easy enough to do, for, after a night of debauched revelry as often happens on new year’s eve, one is ready to promise any one anything until the hangover goes away. In other words, until the resolution is something that both your heart and your head are congruent about, it is unlikely that you will ever be able to implement it. And once your heart is sold on the idea, take it from me, you will not need the prop of a new year resolution to implement it.
The gaiety and celebration anxiety phenomena are not necessarily specific to new year’s eve. Whenever we are faced with any celebration situation like say, birthdays, festivals etc, where convention prescribes a celebratory format, one compulsively feels the need to actively engage in all the aspects of the ritual whether or not one wants to, for fear that one would otherwise be left out of the loop. When our lives are surrounded by uncertainties, we need the comforting predictability of familiar rituals to anchor us and make us feel rooted. Whether these are religious rituals or party rituals, it does not really matter. What does matter is that they should be familiar and socially acceptable. Another reason for celebration anxiety is today’s “work hard, party hard” culture. What most people do not realise is that both are highly stressful and “hard partying” rather than relaxing one more, actually puts one’s body and mind in a state of greater fatigue and results in early burnouts.
Better alternative
Probably the best prescription for the treatment of the Auld Lang Syne Syndrome was made by Robbie Burns himself. Scotland’s national poet, who wrote the extraordinary Auld Lang Syne exhorted everyone “to tak a cup o’kindness yet”. Indeed, if we succeeded in doing just this all year round, we might never feel the need to experience the Auld Lang Syne syndrome ever again. And in case you had a doubt, let me assure you that, by “cup o’kindness”, Burns was not referring to whiskey. At no time like the present do we, as a nation and indeed as a race, need to dig deep into our reserves and find quarts of kindness that we can imbibe through the year. Hopefully, we will find the wherewithal to do this, not as a new year resolution, but as a gift to ourselves. I certainly am going to give it a shot. Happy New Year.
The writer is a psychiatrist, columnist and author of The 24x7 Marriage.
He can be contacted at vijay.nagaswami@gmail.com.
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