OPINION (AN COLÚN): After the eating and chat comes the hangover and bleak spectacle

AFTER the eating and chat, the dancing and singing, comes the hangover and the spectacle of the long, bleak month of January stretching out before us.
Nature is asleep whilst the camaraderie and togetherness of Christmas has been replaced with the serious and relatively unattractive return to the work ethic. For many of us our bank balances make for unpleasant reading. Is it any wonder then that it can feel as if we have transitioned from the sunny uplands to a colourless, lacklustre place? For some it is too much and the dour, bleak miasma of depression begins to gather at the back of their minds.
If you asked people which month of the year do they like the least, I have little doubt that most of them would say January.
January gets its name from the Roman God Janus. I used to think that, for the Romans, Janus represented two-faced people and therefore evoked yet more negative connotations in connection with the month (yes there are lots of unpleasant, two-faced people out there!) In fact I was wrong. While, in a modern context, “Janus-faced” means people who are deceitful and hypocritical, for the Romans he was perceived differently and was held in reverence. The Romans invoked him at the beginning of virtually all of their religious ceremonies. They believed he symbolised the ability to weigh up matters and deliver opinions on those matters in a balanced and comprehensive way; a very valuable character trait.
Janus was the god of beginnings, gateways, transitions between the old and the new. Therefore, at this time of the year, we can interpret his image by saying one of his faces is looking back on the old year, the other is looking out at the year to come.
Looking back we perhaps see our mistakes and failures, our achievements and successes; we perhaps see the loved ones that we have lost. Looking forward we might feel fear, uncertainty, and anxiety, or a sense of resilience and determination to remain fixed in our faith (if religion is important in our lives) come what may. People's insensitivity and the events of life will no doubt cause us pain, but to a great extent we can choose our responses to these things. In so many situations we can learn to respond better.
For the ancient Romans Janus represented the middle ground between major, life-changing dualities such as the beginning and the end, youth and adulthood, life and death, rural and urban, hatred and love, war and peace, barbarism and civilisation. Janus also holds a key in his right hand, which symbolises his protection of doors, gates, thresholds, and other separations or openings between spatial boundaries. In ancient Rome, the symbol of the key also signified that a traveller had come to find safe harbour or trade goods in peace. Roman myth also says that Janus was the first (among the gods or humans) to mint coins, representing a major shift from a more barbarous situation (bartering) to a more civilised one.
Over the Christmas period I went on a couple of long walks in The Slieve Blooms. The source of true strength, namely love, compassion and the creative urge comes to us as we walk in nature. Our busy minds stop for a while and we are intensely, beautifully “there”. The writer Jack Kerouac said this moment came to him once when he was standing “under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night.” It filled him with a sense of being ok, no matter what his worrying mind told him: “It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die... I know this from staring at mountains months on end.”
Kerouac's description of his cold winter moonlit mystical experience is a mood which we all experience from time to time. Some of us forget about it afterwards; some dismiss the event or consider it unimportant. Others prize it like a jewel of inestimable value and learn from it. They understand the importance of creative work, of striving to be individual, being different to the norm; because they know that the mind of God is the very opposite of always obediently conforming to the ways of the world. Yes, we are herd animals; yes, we can feel very happy when part of the herd; yes, this is often a perfectly harmless thing; but sometimes we need to break free and express our individuality. In the interests of balance and mental health we need to sometimes forge this path.
Erich Fromm summed it up nicely: “Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.”

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