Comparing (or not)

When the New Year comes, all of us look back and look ahead. And so often we find ourselves weighing and comparing, contrasting and summarising. What was the last year like? How much sorrow did we have, and how much joy? How did that year compare to all the previous ones? How much did we lose and how much did we win? And as it often happens, we take a sneak peak into others people's lives, too, and wonder about them. Whether they had it better or worse than us, whether they gained or lost more than we did. 

It's totally human, this comparing thing. And also rather pointless.

The truth is, you can't put your experiences and your life events on a weighing scale. It just doesn't work like this. Let's take 2021, for example. All that grief and sorrow which I experienced in the first half of that year, saying goodbye to my closest friend of 15 years, does not cancel all that joy I found in the second part of the year. Neither does the joy take away any of my grief. They stand next to each other, back to back, and there is no way to compare them. Both of them are just there - the largest of human experiences, the deepest of all emotions. 

I still remember those terrible days in mid April when A. stopped replying to my messages. For a couple of long days I didn't even know whether she was still alive. And later, when she was gone, I remember walking mindlessly around the city, trying to walk off some of that terrible burden. Nothing and no-one will ever replace her. She will miss my wedding, dammit. And I will always miss everything that could have happened in her life.

And yet that did / does not lessen in any way the surprise and pure joy of finding a person who has brought color and future to my life, who has completely changed the direction of my path. Who has made me - ok, he hasn't, that I've done out of my free will - study Swedish words every day. All that joy is undiluted. 

I also have a temptation to compare all the recent Christmases. But I want to resist that temptation. All these Christmases over the past 8 years have been spent in the valley of the shadow of death. Mom died on December 23 and it's amazing how long a shadow one death can cast. There were Christmases when we couldn't find aything to be joyful about. But I don't want to "cancel" these Christmases in any way. Let them be there, let them have their rightful place in my life and in my memory. And also let this past Christmas stand by itself, without a comparison. A fairy tale Christmas, as if something straight out of Astrid Lindgren's book. A Christmas filled to the brim with family and love and sunshine and good friends and good food and much needed break from the never ending work.