[Wondergirl]

The following is an essay that Rich wrote in 1992 and one that, he was fond of saying, remains as true today as it was then. Although it alludes to Christmas, he believed that its message is relevant for all people regardless of their faith.

Something about the holiday season always affects me profoundly. I experience a variety of emotions, many of them contradictory. Inevitably, I become anxious about trying to get everything done. Like most people, I view Christmas as a deadline – or rather as a series of deadlines.

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Coupled with this anxiety over deadlines, and balancing it, is the joy of anticipation. I am a child again, looking forward to the Big Day. The main difference, I suppose, is that I focus less on the presents I will get and more on the way I hope people will react to what I am giving them.

These feelings all reflect the material side of the season, and that's O.K. I am not someone who rants about how we lose the “true meaning of Christmas” in the frenzy of consumerism. Certainly, I wish all of us, myself included, could be more laid back about it, but I accept shopping at crowded stores and putting up the outdoor lights in the rain and rushing to get the cards in the mail as part of the tradition.

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At one time, I recall, the holidays were less complicated – not because they were simpler then but just because I was a child. I did not realize then that some people in the world didn't celebrate Christmas as my family did, even though we were not what I would call devout. I certainly did not know that many people did not celebrate Christmas at all. The holidays meant anticipation and excitement – presents, a tree, story-telling, special music, friends and relatives coming to call, a reprieve from school.

As a child, I also had an inner sense that, beyond the externals of the Christmas holiday was a spirit that I could not quite identify. Much as I got a tangible joy from receiving, I learned that I somehow got a warm feeling inside whenever someone expressed delight at a present I had given. And the memory of that feeling lasted longer than the memory of what I got for Christmas.

Even as a child, I perceived a change in the air that had nothing to do with the weather. All of my senses recognized something that my mind couldn't identify and, oddly enough, didn't need to identify. I saw it in people's faces; I heard it in their voices. I felt it in the music that filled the air. Whatever that something was, it stuck to me even when I was alone. It burrowed into me and made a warm spot. It gave me a sense of well-being that overshadowed even the anticipation of presents on Christmas morning. Though it was difficult then to imagine Christmas without a tree and presents, it was impossible to imagine it without the certain indefinable feeling that everyone seemed to have.

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As I became a little older, I began to lose this inner sense. With misguided intellectual arrogance, I became involved in religious or metaphysical debates about questions for which I could not possibly have the answers. And, rather than illuminating my path, my intellect made me cynical and intolerant. I lost not just the excitement and anticipation of the holidays but the joy as well. Christmas had its pleasant moments, but mostly it was something to be gotten through.

Then, a few years ago, I had the kind of awakening that marks the start of all changes in ourselves. I realized that I had to cast aside the intellectual arrogance that I incorrectly believed was the hallmark of being wise and grownup. I needed to be childlike again. No, I couldn't go back to believing in Santa Claus. None of us can. But we can feel the inner sense that we knew as children – if we trust our hearts more than our heads.

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When I do that, when I focus on what I feel more than on what I think, I can more readily regard the holidays as a spiritual celebration rather than a merely religious one. And then I begin to understand what they're all about. Important as specific religious beliefs are to individual observations of the holidays, the season reflects a universal spirit that may be shared by all people, regardless of their specific religion.

The holidays have a lot to do with remembering. While the camaraderie of the season turns us outward, many of us also turn inward. The holiday season, in proximity to the New Year, invites us to take an inventory of ourselves – not just what we are but what we have been and, probably most important, what we are becoming. Everyone, I think, should spend some time alone at this time of the year. I always make a point of it. In solitude, with no companions but my memories, I can confront my sorrows and make them at least bittersweet; I can examine how I have affected others, for good or ill, and how they have affected me; I can absolve myself of guilt, a useless emotion, and give myself some credit for my efforts to be a decent human being, however bumbling these efforts may have been; I can regret my misfortunes a little less and appreciate my blessings a lot more. I can look on life for a moment not as a burden to be endured, a race to be run, or a task to be mastered – but as a journey full of adventure and challenges and surprises.

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What life is really about is walking alone on a winter day and being at peace with oneself. It's about being with other people and sharing their tears and laughter. It's about feeling another person's pain or joy so intensely that it might as well be your own. It's about lovers in the park immersed in each other; it's about the old man on the park bench with no one to care. It's about hearing a child's laughter and remembering how it was. It's about seeing a newborn child and marveling at the miracle of life; it's about watching someone die and knowing that we all do.

All this humanity inhabits a remarkable and various world, only occasionally regarding it with appropriate wonder. But when we do, our senses absorb and our minds record incomparable images. Remember how white the snow is when it first falls? How it seems to whisper as it comes down? Remember how gold the leaves become in the fall? Remember the clean, fresh smell of the first spring evening? The unleashed energy of a summer thunderstorm?

Have you listened to the waves on the beach and heard the ebb and flow of something that you don't quite understand? Have you stood on a mountaintop and watched the sun rise and been overwhelmed by the grand drama that has been reenacted every day since the first dawn? Have you looked up on a clear, starlit night, feeling very small indeed – yet somehow privileged to be part of such a grand scheme?

The inner sense of the holidays is a sense that our lives begin and end in miracle and mystery and a sense that, throughout our lives, we are constantly involved in miracles and mysteries that we often fail to see. It's a sense of wonder that we know as children and that, if we're lucky, grows eternally with us. It's a voice reminding us to live every day as if it were special – because it is.

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*If you have hung around Q&A sites for a while, you may remember Rich, a grammar expert on askme.com, PointAsk.com, Answerway.com, and others. He was also a member here, but briefly, before his death on June 16, 2011. He hosted his own very excellent and interesting grammar site at The Grammar Curmudgeon and was busy writing a book on being a grumpy grammarian.