Christmas and Rubin's Vases

A wise person in my life recently observed that I can sometimes get in such a state or that I'm sometimes in a frame of mind that's pretty obdurate, so that I can only see one side of my relationship with others.  They are who I see them as at that moment.  Given that one of my recurring New Year's resolutions is to be less judgmental than I was last year and that I can see how I often jump not from observation to judgment but from observation to curiosity or even a theory, this shook me.  This goal is important enough to me that it now ends Frosted Boughs:  The Arts of a Minimalist Life in the chapter about patience.  Here's the passage from a Christmastime visit to Awarehouse books where I was picking up Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart for someone who needed to be more patient with herself.  I'd called to have their single copy put aside for me but when I arrived there was already a queue, so I wandered awhile before joining an even longer queue:  

    "Incense was burning somewhere, and Loreena McKennitt was singing her plangent Christmas songs.  Pleasures filled the air.  The generous, thoughtful faces around me had a kind of glow. After my wandering, I simply went to join the queue, which was now longer, and the clerk once again singled me out for help, perhaps because I wasn't holding anything I wanted to buy.  Perhaps she couldn't see my smile under the mask--one of the social challenges I've hated most during COVID-time.  I was fine in line, I told her.  I was listening to Loreena McKennitt and smelling the incense and studying faces.  I was just fine.  Being curious and fiercely in this moment meant that I was just fine.

"Being patient is a minimalist response to the world.  You can just be curious because there's nothing to hurry up, nothing to fix, nothing to complain about, nothing to judge.  You only need to be here in this moment which time has given you.  If you are at the centre of anything, it's your own experience, and it's enticingly serene.  [The "Patience" chapter talks about how impatient people often see themselves as the centre of the universe.] Patience, the minimalist response, is empowering because there's nothing beyond your control that you nevertheless feel you need to change.  At its noblest, patience shuns judgment.  And then, by a sleight-of-hand that minimalism often achieves, that small act of patience humbly embraces everything."

Well.  You can see why I was shaken by that judgment.  Fast forward a few days, and I was putting the finishing touches on dinner when Bill put on an old Nat King Cole Christmas CD.  The cascading strings and the mellowness of his voice and "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" took me right back to the Fifties, and I was suddenly suffused with gratitude for my mother, who made Christmas as wonderful and beautiful as she could.  She baked every evening the week before Christmas and on Saturday night she'd make Divinity, a candy made by heating sugar and water to the soft ball stage and then pouring it slowly into a bowl full of egg whites while you beat them like mad.  We'd all stand around to see how it would come out this year.  I hated Divinity.  To me, it was like vanilla ice cream:  just sweet and little else.  But one had to admire her skill and the cloud-like candy it made.  One year she whipped up Ivory Snow (I don't know if this even exists any more:  snowy flakes of laundry soap) and created the outline of a creche and star on the large mirror in the dining room.  Or she filled milk cartons with ice and poured in heated paraffin that she'd coloured with a crayon she'd stolen from my box to make candles that gave off a lacy light.  Presents were thoughtful and exciting. She called Christmas Eve "The holiest night of the year," and she made you feel this in every gesture, everything she cooked or decorated.

Now I had a vexed relationship with my mother that took several years with a great psychiatrist to sort out before I would let myself get pregnant because I wasn't going to hand down some of her mothering habits with some of her genes.  I've come over the years to see that she did her best, and that it's true for each of us that our very best isn't sometimes good enough. Can I put that in italics or underline it, because it's an important foundation for the facet of me that eschews judgment?  It's true for every one one of us that our best sometimes just isn't good enough.  (There.  I got in both.)  I often thought that the drive with which she struggled to make an elegant life out of a working-class income was a bit pompous or pretentious. Or sometimes I saw it as protective coloration.  

But in that wonderful Nat King Cole moment, I could see both of those things were true, and I was most grateful for the latter, for her determination to make our lives as beautiful as she could, especially at Christmas.  And then I thought of Rubin's Vases.  Edgar Rubin was a Danish psychologist who observed in 1915 that when we looked, say, at a white vase on a black background, we could see either two faces or the vase, but not both at the same time.  It has to do with the borders of the two being shared; the white vase has to be completely enclosed by the black surrounding, much as our own faults are often impearled by our virtues or our virtues by our flaws. Our eyes can only make sense of one image at a time when it's interpreting something ambiguous.  

But maybe our brains or our hearts can take in more complexity. And what is life and family, particularly in the dark of the year, but complicated and often ambiguous?  I think I've found myself a new New Year's resolution.  I'm going to see if I can't perceive both the figure and the ground in the people who are close to me, particularly in those moments of strain and imperfection and anger and pain.  See their context.  See their central core. See the stories that have gotten them here.  Take a breath.  Take a second look.