I love the holidays.

The stretch of time between Halloween and New Year’s Day is like my Super Bowl. Honestly, we could extend that timeframe straight through my birthday (which is the end of January), the actual Super Bowl (I’m a sucker for a good halftime show), and Valentine’s Day (because who doesn’t love love and chocolate).

The point is, I love a reason to celebrate. To gather with family and friends. To engage in sentimental traditions. To eat and drink all my favorite things. To give gifts that make others smile. To express gratitude for all we have to celebrate, especially when it can often feel like the world around us is careening out of control.

But this stretch of time, particularly as we get older, can feel like a marathon of overstimulation, overconsumption, and full-on mental, emotional, financial, and physical overwhelm.

While many of us would love to spend all our time basking in the glow of twinkle lights, Hallmark movies, holiday parties, festive music, family traditions, and sweet treats, we struggle to find balance with our real-world responsibilities. I mean, who wants to work and run errands and pay bills and tackle projects when there is holiday fun to be had?

And then there’s the fact that “the most wonderful time of the year” is often filled with grief, sadness, anxiety, depression, frustration, and loneliness for so many. Between family drama, social obligations, trying to make things magical for little ones, missing those we’ve lost, and dealing with the stress of just being out in the world more, we may want to feel joyful and celebratory, but that isn’t always easy when we’re juggling so much.

There’s no magic pill to cure the holiday blues (or the holiday madness) but one thing we can do is learn to manage our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. To show up with gentleness for ourselves and others.

Here are three quotes from one of my favorite teachers, Pema Chödrön, that can help us navigate the holidays more mindfully:

“Whether it’s ourselves, our lovers, bosses, children, local Scrooge, or the political situation, it’s more daring and real not to shut anyone out of our hearts and not to make the other into an enemy. If we begin to live like this, we’ll find that we actually can’t make things completely right or completely wrong anymore, because things are a lot more slippery and playful than that. Everything is ambiguous; everything is always shifting and changing, and there are as many different takes on any given situation as there are people involved. Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable.”

“What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.”

“Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. In other words, if we’re going to be more cheerful in the future, it’s because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.”

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