December

Everything now should be at rest. We have begun our descent into the shortest day. Daylight is reluctant, precious, brief. Outside, our gardens should be hibernating while they wait for spring. Yet the final leaves are clinging on, wistful and tenacious, refusing to fall. And we fill our darkened days with ‘things to do’ and busy rituals which never leave us time to think. We can’t let go. We have lost our connection with the need for rest; for the stillness at the centre. We ignore our innate capacity for stillness; for doing nothing; for just listening and quietly watching. We tend to dismiss these things as ‘wasting time’ and feel the fear of isolation if we do not join in with everything.

But movement begins from stillness and a journey of a thousand miles with a single step. And perhaps it is even possible that a capacity for winter stillness may be encoded somewhere deep within our DNA: bone fossils from early Neanderthals found at Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain showed seasonal breaks in growth similar to those which occur in other hibernating animals, like cave bears. Whatever the truth of that, there must have been long periods in our primal winter when there was nothing to do and when we were habituated to doing nothing. When we watched and waited and conserved our energy.

The run-up to modern-day Christmas is often anything but reflective. And of course it is right to celebrate the winter solstice: the beginning of the end of the darkness and the return of the life-giving light, whether that has a religious meaning for us or not. But do we really need a whole month (or more) of commercially-driven jollity?

In stillness, it is possible to catch a glimpse of the infinite. Great creative effort can induce this sense of stillness; this meditative state. The concentration required to play music, or to write poetry or to draw from life can bring about a paradoxical release from concentration; a balance which is restoring and healing.

It is difficult to find stillness in our busy, urban lives. But it is there. It can be there in frost-starred late-night streets; in wintry urban parks. In our sleeping gardens, our darkened evenings and in our bright-blue early mornings. It is worth pursuing. Claiming the right to stillness is a radical act.