Looking back to move forwards

There's value in looking back, especially if we can take something from the past to help us thrive in the future.

I’m watching a film about the making of the Band Aid song ‘Do They Know It's Christmas’ from 1984, and it's making me nostalgic about my youth when everything was laid out before me and I had no idea what to do with any of it.

‘Most of these people are still alive,’ I say to my daughter, marvelling at how forty years have withered but not destroyed so many of my contemporaries.

‘Oh hang on, he’s dead. So’s she, and I think her daughter is too.’ Everything begins to feel much shakier underfoot.

‘This song gave Africa an image problem and made everyone think she needed saving,’ my daughter says while picking the chunks of chocolate from the top of a cookie.

‘I see they’re making a musical about it.’

‘They shouldn’t bother. Aid is never better than trade.'

She shares with me a social media post where someone is asking which number you open first on your Advent calendar, 1 or 24?

'9% of all respondents open their Advent calendars in reverse order, apparently.'

I spit a bit of my coffee over the sofa.

I suppose it’s an understandable confusion in an increasingly secular world, where Advent calendars contain chocolate, coffee, or vibrators and cock-rings.

In my childhood, an Advent calendar was a flimsy cardboard affair with predictable pictures behind each little door, many of which would flap open in a light breeze ruining what little awe and wonder remained.

We always had a peek behind the special double door of number 24, although I don't know why because it was always the baby Jesus lying in a manger with a few farmyard animals hanging about, and maybe the Three Wise Men if it had been designed by someone who had never heard of Epiphany.

When the children were small we bought a fabric advent calendar in the shape of a Christmas tree with 24 small pockets containing a variety of stitched gingerbread men, brightly coloured parcels, holly, mistletoe and so on that are hung onto the tree throughout December.

By the time they could count, there was always an argument over who would hang the even numbers and thus be the chosen one to put the final trinket on top of the tree.

In the end, we wrote the years on a piece of paper and the name of the child whose turn it was to hang the first number.

It still gets hung up on December 1st even though the children have grown up and moved away.

At some stage, a tub of chocolates was introduced to mitigate the complaints about friends’ edible calendars. Something of its wonderous innocence was lost.

During my childhood, perhaps tiring of the glitter from the Advent calendar falling into my breakfast, I discovered the joy of an advent candle.

The seasonal happiness of turning the lights out during 'Z Cars' or 'The Generation Game' and burning the candle carefully down past one of the numbers printed on the smooth wax felt properly Christmassy.

A few years ago, to relive that fond memory, I bought one again, but Advent candles aren’t what they used to be and, having lit it on the first day of December, I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and empty the dishwasher, and came back to find it had already burned down past December 7th.

So now I just light a normal candle every day through December and, although for a child the candle or calendar is a way of excitedly marking off the interminable days toward Christmas, it feels for me like a perfect time to reflect on the year that’s past rather than eagerly anticipating the future.

Since establishing the ritual of lighting a candle each day through December and staring at the flame while reflecting on the year I discovered something else about my relationship with candles. I started to feel a pang of anxiety about burning it at all because doing so meant it would disappear to nothing and then it wouldn’t exist at all.

The pleasure in burning a candle comes from its destruction, and it's only a willingness to watch it dwindle away that gives access to its joy.

Life is like this too, because too much time travelling into the past attempting to recover lost glories or eagerness to burst forward into a future unwritten robs us of moments we're standing in and the only part of our lives over which we have any influence.

In the giddy excitement of waiting for something it’s easy to get caught up in an unhelpful kind of nostalgia.

Rather than labouring under the lie that the past was better, it might be useful to use it as a guide to help us identify what we want to change and improve.

‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ may prove to be defining political slogans in the decade to come, but both extol the virtue of going backwards to a time that passed long ago.

In contrast, the 'Slow living' movement, or 'Analogue Renaissance' feel like valuable attempts to rein in the pace of change for fear that too much of what we truly value will be lost and become, sooner than we realise, too far out of reach.

So, when I light my candle each day through December and watch the yellow flame dancing gently in the gloom, I'll think about what's best left behind, what I'd prefer to hold onto and try and find the grace to accept what I'm unable to change.

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On ‘Sideways’ this week we’re talking about ‘Envy’. There’s an opportunity to have a cockroach named after you, a discussion about good questions to ask when speed dating, and I’m unconvinced about the wisdom of putting a chocolate orange in a pie.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for being here, I appreciate you.

See you next time