The holiday season is here! Parties and family gatherings, phone calls and Skype “visits” will fill the next few weeks with the highest volume of social interactions I’m likely to have this year. As the social pace quickens, I am always struck by my increased tendency toward emotional reactivity. No other time seems to provoke such a range of internal states and corresponding outward manifestations of self.
Regardless of how much I may have changed—perhaps even beyond recognition, to my eye—my family will see me in the context of a lifelong narrative continuity. Friends, in-laws, more distant relatives and complete strangers will all have their own perspectives and their own projections of me. None of this is surprising. After all, each of us is limited to a narrow slice of information and experience of the other, and those inadequate samples are refracted through our own biases and ideological filters.
The truly striking aspect of being confronted with such a parade of projections is the power that each one has to produce a corresponding change in my experience of self. With my family, the conversation will hardly have begun when, despite my best intentions, I will find myself feeling and acting like my combative, teenage self. Likewise every other interaction. I might lurch from confident and articulate, to awkward and hesitant, to irritated and judgmental.
This holiday season I plan to remind myself to be present and to listen, to allow others to share their best selves, and to observe the passing of my own inner states without allowing them to provoke reactivity. I will remind myself that the people with whom I cross paths are themselves likely suffering, that compassion is likely the most appropriate posture, and that I almost certainly misunderstand others to the same degree that I feel misunderstood by them.
All I want for Christmas is my best, least reactive self.
Deliberative Dad 