# Can We Keep It By:: [[Ross Jackson]] 2024-12-26 The holiday spirit can last, but only if we keep it. Often, people don’t. Day-to-day responsibilities often crowd out the joy and good cheer of the season. Things quickly return to normal. If there is an underlying sadness to the holiday season, it is the awareness that the warmth shared among us is transitory. Some view this as indicating an inherent phoniness of the season. People pretend to care for a short period and then revert to the same self-absorbed people they were prior. Maybe it is phoniness. Maybe it is simply difficult to sustain that level of caring indefinitely. Life is filled with stress. Dealing with this takes a toll. Most people do care, and some, amazingly, can sustain a high degree of compassion for others throughout the year. A worthy goal would be to try to sustain the holiday spirit beyond the holidays. If we see each other as brothers and sisters in our shared humanity and appreciate that the meanest people among us are often the ones who are hurting the most, we can better sustain compassion. Doing so will allow us to be kinder to those in need, which is all of us. Two common themes of these blogs are that we are moving into the age of radical choice and that in a society, there is not us and them; there is only us. Can we keep the holiday spirit throughout the year? In the age of choice, we can, but only when we see that “they” are us. #### Related Items [[Transitions]] [[Caring]] [[Goals]] [[Society]] [[The Age of Choice]] [[Together]]