Out of darkness -- brighter days

The world is getting darker.

Our part of it, anyway.

Oh, we’ve got a little while to go before things bottom out... Let’s see, according to your calendar and mine, that would be happening on Friday – 7:38 a.m. local time right up to 4:31 in the afternoon – 8 hours, 52 minutes, 55 seconds of daylight.

The shortest, darkest day of the year. The winter solstice – the real reason for the season…

Yeah, way, way before Santa or Magi or dreidels or the Times Square crystal ball folks – especially those of us shivering up here in the northern latitudes – have been celebrating that hesitant, tentative, slowly strengthening return of the sun – the great seasonal turn-around. Rays of hope in a time of darkness.

Rays of hope in a time of darkness … boy, we all could use a few of those right about now.

As news of the year goes, this one hasn’t balanced out on the good side for any too many of us -- and with the economy showing signs of a bad bellyache, an environmental thermostat stuck on high, and politicians around the world who can’t find their gluteus maximus with both hands.On the average newsday,  Pollyanna herself had been hard pressed to find much to be glad about.

And each of us…we’ve had our losses, pains and personal disasters. There are times when our days are very dark, indeed.

But that’s hard to think about right now. No matter that each night is a little longer, a little darker than the last --.’tis the season to be jolly … the most wonderful time of the year … the hap-hap-happy holidays. It’s all joy to the world and merry, merry, merry.

Still, for all our bell ringing, present buying and wassail drinking that darkness is going to stay with us until it’s time for it to leave.

No matter what we do or how hard we pretend, bad things will happen and things will get better.

I guess that’s why I’ve always been a solstice kind of guy.

Friday will be as dark a day as will ever be. Four days later we celebrate Christmas – and there will be 34 more seconds of daylight for us all to enjoy. The world will be 34 seconds brighter. There’s hope out of the darkness.

And for me at least, the best part is that this hope won’t be coming from a miracle – it’s just the way the world works.. If we watch for it, hope follows despair surely as day follows night; surely as spring and summer follow the deepest winter.

And sure as things get better, things get worse.

Sure as there’s a solstice in December, there’s another one in June.

And the days begin to get shorter…

Celebrate it? No. Yet we live with it too.

Now my father lays no claim to be a philosopher and I doubt anyone would give that title to Doris Day, still, when that princess of perky came on the car radio, no matter who was riding along Dad would crank the volume and join in the refrain, “Que será será…”

It always reminded him, he said, that things never got so bad that  they couldn’t get worse … or, more likely, better. And, of course, the reverse and inverse is equally true – so, it’s best not to get carried away in either direction.

We live from solstice to solstice and even as the darkness deepens, we dare anticipate the light.

Brighter days are coming.