What Are We Seeking?
I went to the mall on Friday. Yes, I really did. / Thought Cookie: Edition 35: Vol. 4
I went to the mall on the Friday after Thanksgiving. (I generally avoid it, but there were reasons involving my two daughters.)
It was thronged with people, chock-full of them, masses of people shopping, crowding into stores, looking for the best deal or the perfect gift. Watching the people walk from store to store determinedly reminded me of people on a pilgrimage, people intently seeking something transformative, transcendent.
What are we seeking, I wondered.
At the low point of this excursion, I witnessed a slightly awkward 8- or 9-year-old girl with wiry, fine hair asking a salesperson at the store Sephora, “I need some hair oil.”
My heart broke. No, I thought, you need to believe you are perfect as you are.
But this culture has convinced her otherwise, of course. Success! A customer for life!
What are we seeking?
Instagram solutions. TikTok perfection. The hack to beat all hacks. The garment or product to defeat our deepest insecurities and fears: that we are unlovable, incomplete or inadequate as we are.
Gosh. I want that, too.
I’m not currently a churchgoer, but as I looked around the mall, I thought, “This makes perfect sense. Instead of going to church, or seeking spiritual completion in a community or nature, or a sacred practice, we’ve come…here.
We were practically begging to be exploited, to hand over our hard-earned money for a chance to fit in well or fabulously stand out in the most acceptable way possible.
“We have no religion anymore, but this one: capitalism, consumerism,” I thought. “The con is complete.”
I am not immune to these forces, of course. I ended up coming home with a shopping bag and two purchased items.
I participated in the con.
And I wondered about it all.
A line from a poem I read two decades ago in a church bulletin that had landed on my desk as the editor of a local newspaper always comes back to me this time of year. It went something like,
“....calling me from the too-bright celebration…”
It’s a too-bright, too-loud, too-much time of year.
And there’s part of me that wants to do the opposite: to lay back and be in the darkness this time of year gives us, to contemplate, to wonder, to be held in healing darkness.
I want to see candlelight and firelight and be wonderfully transfixed by it.
I want to honor the past and let it slay me. I want to gently, delicately imagine a future to come and maybe put some intention to it.
And then some days, I want to lean into the fiction of the bright lights and loud music and jovial, nostalgic sentiments that float through the air. I want to purchase every single thing on my daughters’ Christmas lists and feel like a success at this consumeristic game. I want to bake everyone’s favorite cookies and wear the perfect holiday dress and watch all the movies and wrap every present like it’s a work of art.
Those are the tensions of this too-bright time.
The morning before the mall blitz, my husband and I got up early and started the day with a soak in our newly acquired hot tub he’d spent the last month installing and preparing for us.
The sun was just sunning up.
The birds were singing and the greenery of our yard was so lush, the green and flowers felt like they were healing me with their color and their impossible beauty.
We were there together, in the warmth of the water, in the start of the day, in the massaging jets. The night before, we had hosted an incredible holiday for 16 souls, beautiful people I love, who were entertained, heard, and fed at our table.
In retrospect, and in the moment itself, that was the space, those were the breaths, that fed my soul.
That was the thing I was seeking.
As I get older, and enjoy and wrestle honestly with the gift of age, I see more clearly that these are the things I really want.
The moments of early day sun.
The breaths.
The morning.
The quiet.
The simple.
I still get distracted by the too-bright celebration.
But I will always come back home to myself in the quiet of the start of day.
I hope my own act of stilling, of quieting, of observing and reflecting contributes something to this world, and hopefully, to each of you.
I loved so many things about this, Emily. This, "We were practically begging to be exploited, to hand over our hard-earned money for a chance to fit in well or fabulously stand out in the most acceptable way possible." and this, It’s a too-bright, too-loud, too-much time of year." and this,
"I want to purchase every single thing on my daughters’ Christmas lists and feel like a success at this consumeristic game." I also loved "the sun sunning up."
I too felt just like you -- can I just give in to the game? It's soooo much easier, until it isn't. And then it's just a little sad and a lot tiring. I almost bought these blankets for my mom, a dear friend and my husband. I got one as a gift and it's deliciously soft and heavy. As I debated whether or not to buy them, I wondered _why_ I was doing it. And I recognized that I wanted to give them something that would make them know how much I loved them. I left my shopping cart with the cursor hovered above the go button and called my mom instead.