The season of light: Gifts of illumination come in small moments

As a boy, Albert Einstein wondered what it would be like to ride a beam of light. The answers he found as a scientist changed our view of the universe. At the speed of light, there is only light, since nothing else can travel so fast. Concepts of “here” and “there,” “now” and “then” collapse. Distance and time lose their meaning.

There is a quality to light that universally fascinates. To Hindus, it symbolizes the victory of good over evil in the festival of Diwali. To Jews, it miraculously blessed their return to the Jerusalem Temple, now commemorated in the celebration of Hanukkah. To Christians, it heralded the coming of Christ Jesus.

Yet there is something in Einstein’s discoveries, remote as they may seem, that also speaks to us intimately – about the discoveries of the human heart. 

I remember traveling as a Monitor correspondent to Afghanistan, convinced that my days and nights would be in a state of anxiety and fear. What I found was a warmth and kindness that remains to this day – conversations over sizzling kebabs, the smiles of teachers and milkmen and tribal chiefs, more sugary cups of tea than the principles of mathematics can calculate. In my days there and my memories now, distances shrank, time expanded, and light knew only the sharing of light.

The chords of this season can at times be kitschy. But there is truth beneath them that yearns to expand in our lives, if we only give it space and time. In this beautiful collection of stories, we celebrate the light that shines so brightly in this season – from candlesticks, in trees, through connections to one another, and in our own hearts.

But we also presume to catch some small glimpse of Einstein’s wonder: the view of a wider world filled with light.

– Mark Sappenfield, Editor

Feeling a cushion of kindness in Beijing

“Look at these!” exclaimed the auntie, or cleaning woman, after we exchanged greetings one recent morning in a building near my Beijing office. Her eyes shining, she held up one big carrot and a large white parsnip. 

“Today is Lidong, so I’m making dumplings,” she said as she bent over a utility sink to rinse the dirt off her prized vegetables.

Seeing I was curious, she went on. Lidong means the beginning of winter in the Chinese lunar calendar, she explained. On this day in southern China, where she’s from, people venture into the hills to bring harvest offerings to their ancestors’ graves. In the north, they eat boiled wheat dumplings stuffed with meat and vegetables – seen as fortifying against the chill.

“You should eat them too!” she urged, offering to share hers. 

Practical wisdom, food, warmth, and friendship – Chinese people offer these in abundance as I settle into life as an American in China. On returning this year for the first time since 2018, I wasn’t sure whether the frosty relations between Beijing and Washington would cast a shadow – but soon I found these are ignored by most ordinary folk. Indeed, the affinity between Chinese and Americans, and admiration for the other’s distinct cultures that I recall from living here years ago, seem to have survived.

“The problems between our two governments are their thing,” one Beijing retiree I met during a walk told me, flicking the air with his hand as if sweeping that topic into a corner. “They don’t concern you and me.”

I feel this steady cushion of kindness from Chinese strangers – like the older man who gave me a piece of cardboard to lie on when we were both stranded at a train station during a COVID-19 lockdown.

Later on Lidong, as I biked down Beijing’s main street, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, I felt a hint of the bone-chilling winter winds that sweep into the capital from the north across the Gobi Desert. 

“You have to wrap up! Beijing will get much colder,” a young traffic officer in a bright yellow jacket advised me when I stopped to ask directions. As I turned to pedal away, he said, “Man zou,” literally “walk slowly” – or take care.

As darkness fell, my eye caught the lights of a dumpling shop, with cooks in white hats and aprons rolling dough and filling the half-moon shaped morsels in the front window. I hurried inside and ordered a bowl. Sipping the warm broth, I felt grateful to the auntie for brightening my day. 

– Ann Scott Tyson, the Monitor’s Beijing correspondent, is co-author of “Chinese Awakenings: Life Stories From the Unofficial China.”

The complex light of the South   

I grew up during the modern civil rights era, and for me and for many other Black people like me, the state of Mississippi was nothing but a series of ugly words and even uglier images. Emmett Till. Freedom Riders. Lynchings. Murders. Medgar Evers. All of this played out in stark black and white. Not a place you’d choose to go to.

So I was surprised when I found myself, in 2002, taking a job in a small city in north Mississippi.  

On my first day here, fresh back in the United States from living many years abroad, I came upon a South that was very different from the one I’d been told about and expected. The tragic history was real, and it was evident. Though excuses were being made, at that point no one was trying to deny that what had happened had happened. But there existed another evident reality. Black and white people – and their numbers were almost equal – were intermingling on the street. They chatted with each other. They held doors open for each other. It was obvious that these people knew each other, knew each other’s families, knew this shared place they called home.

This is both the darkness of the South and its light.

Charles Evers, Medgar Evers’ older brother, returned home to Mississippi in 1946 after serving in World War II, determined to register to vote. His determination was strongly opposed. Each day when Mr. Evers showed up at the courthouse in Canton, Mississippi, there’d be a ring of pickup trucks to greet him. Guns pointed out the windows. Threats and racial epithets hurled. The sad and, to Mr. Evers, baffling part was that those trucks belonged to white men he knew. Those guns were pointed at him by men he’d hunted and fished with when they were boys.

How is it possible to hate somebody you know? Because in the South, more than perhaps in any other part of the nation, the races do know each other. More so in smaller towns, but no matter where you go, knowing is there. In the South, the races are bonded together in ways I’d not witnessed anywhere else I lived.

I came to see that knowing as the light that can lead not only the South but also the nation and the world to a better tomorrow. It has informed both my novels and my life.

– Deborah Johnson is the author of the novel “The Secret of Magic” and the forthcoming “Washington and Leigh.” She lives in Columbus, Mississippi.

The regenerating power of memory  

My earliest memory of holiday lights is my grandfather snuffing out Hanukkah candles with his fingers. He would pinch out the flames whenever we grandchildren outnumbered the candles, so that even if the older kids had lit the full number for that evening, we younger kids could still have a chance to light. As a 5- or 6-year-old, I was struck by the power of this man, squelching fire without even a wince.

Recently, I mentioned this memory to my own kids, curious if they had any holiday-light recollections of their own. One of my 17-year-old daughters – the one we adopted 21 months ago after her mother died – immediately recalled her mother’s Christmas tree.  

“For me, the tree was never about the ornaments or the gifts,” she said, lighting up with the memory herself. “It was the lights that made me feel bathed in warmth and peace.”

Then she grabbed her phone and pulled up a photo from Christmas 2019: the living room of her old house, now sold; her beloved dog, Orris, now living with another family. The focus of the photo is the tree, glowing red, gold, and green against the back wall, its reflection casting a shimmer on Orris.

And I thought: Here is a Christian memory in a Jewish home. Those lights are still bathing her, connecting her disrupted childhood to her slowly, but beautifully, emerging adulthood. 

Then it occurred to me: When my grandfather snuffed out those Hanukkah candles, his power wasn’t just in his thick fingertips, impervious to the fire. It was in his insistence that everyone can strike a light into the darkness.

Fifty years later, my new daughter looks at her old Christmas lights, grieving for an era snuffed out too soon, but warmed by a faith that she, too, can regenerate the light.

– Kinney Zalesne, a former Microsoft executive, is a strategy consultant for social change organizations in Washington.

How to treat each other “lightly”

The storm filled the valley like a river fills a bucket. Fast and full. One moment the cars in the office parking lot were visible; the next, the world had gone white. We adults in our adult office clothes stared out at the fury of flakes the same way our pajamaed 8-year-old selves must’ve stared at a school-canceling storm. Yet unlike most 8-year-olds, we had to get ourselves home.

At noon I went out and brushed off the first 4 inches, dreading the inches still to fall and the inevitable drive. By 5 p.m. the roads were slick with packed snow, and most everyone drove with a caution that meant a 15-minute commute would stretch past 40.

But at every light, every intersection, I began to notice a communal graciousness that displayed gentleness between neighbors. There was a pause. As one set of burning red traffic lights switched to a glowing green, drivers rested for a length of time I can best describe as four heartbeats. This miniature intermission gave space for the possibility of a neighbor sliding into the intersection on bald tires. For a Prius spinning on fresh ice, a pickup’s hind end fishtailing. A collective breath when no one expected an impatient horn.

Both the seasoned Montanans and the recent California and Washington transplants needed time to adjust to the sudden season change. Winter makes neighbors of us all.

Just like long, dark nights, inflation, gas prices, supply-chain issues, and COVID-19 can make neighbors of us all, too.

As I waited for the line of cars in front of me to creep forward, I wondered how long we would treat each other “lightly.” How long could we hold each other with the kindness that recognizes our shared struggle?

These daily moments – how many intersections do you drive through every day? – are where we can show kindness beyond our daily circle. Beyond the people whose names we know.

In a world where we don’t wait for most anything, how valuable is it to pause long enough so a neighbor in distress doesn’t feel foolish or embarrassed or rushed? So they might be held in an instant of kindness when frustration might be the norm. We have a lot of snow ahead, which means many opportunities to graciously pause for one another.

When the light turned green, my tires took a second to catch, and no one honked. 

– Noah Davis is the author of the poetry collection “Of This River.” He lives in Missoula, Montana.    

A beam of recognition pierced the doubt

From the moment I learned I’d be a father, I was consumed with doubt about how I’d fulfill that role.

I’d spent close to two decades in a complicated relationship – love stretched to the limit across oceans, between careers, and everything in between. When we were separated by a COVID-19 lockdown, I learned via a video call from the United States to my home in Turkey that we were having a baby.  

In the months that followed, I’d often stand on the roof of my apartment building in Istanbul, like George Bailey on the bridge. I’d grown up with divorced parents who lived on opposite ends of the country, and dreaded duplicating that situation for a child. It was uncertain I’d share a continent with my child, let alone the same house. The prospect of failure felt bottomless.

At the risk of losing my job, I moved back to the U.S. But six months after my son was born, my relationship with his mother officially ended. I moved out, stayed in the same city, and spent time each day with my son, falling in love as I watched him grow into his own person. Whenever we played, I tried to give him space to figure out what interested him and develop it. It felt like we were forging a bond, but, with babies, it’s often hard to know.

Shortly after my son’s first birthday, I got a job offer that meant moving halfway across the country for a year and then overseas indefinitely. There were countless personal and professional reasons to accept it, but how would my son experience it? 

Now, eight months later, I visit monthly. And until recently, I was feeling my son saw me as a babysitter at best. But, on my last trip, he’d just started talking and, as it turned out, enlightening me.

When we were playing, I asked where his nose was. He pointed. 

I’d never tried to teach him to call me “Dad” but, out of curiosity, and without expecting much, I asked, “Where’s your Dad?”  

Without hesitating, he pointed at me and said, “Da.” He said it again, smiled, and pushed his finger into my chest.

In that moment, the darkness I’d been carrying lifted. He confirmed for me that, just like his nose, he knows I’ll always be a part of him. 

– Tom A. Peter, a journalist based in Arlington, Virginia, spent nearly two decades covering the Middle East. 

Behold: The spectrum of what can be   

The first time I cried at the finish of the Comrades Marathon in South Africa this year, a couple was jogging over the line, clutching a life-size photo of a baby girl with fat, round cheeks. “In Loving Memory,” it read. As they crossed, they flung their arms over each other and began to weep. So did I. In truth though, it wasn’t just about them.

For me, there’s something generally about a marathon finish line. It’s a place where, on a mass scale, human beings are doing something they previously believed impossible.

To be there is to watch in real time as the aperture on someone’s life slowly opens, as the possibilities for what they could be expand to accommodate what they have just done – this impossible, possible thing.

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport.” So begins the classic Christmas film “Love, Actually,” as the camera pans over real scenes of friends, families, and couples reuniting at the London airport. There are mothers sweeping their children off the ground, couples sprinting toward each other, fathers and sons pulling each other into big bear hugs.

I feel similarly about a marathon finish.

“It’s like living your entire life in a day,” one runner remarked to me recently about the Comrades, which is 56 miles long. By that, he meant that a race like that will send a person hurtling through the full spectrum of human emotions – from elation to despair, with everything in between. What drags a person through that experience, and out to the other side, is often something profound – like the couple I saw running for their late daughter. But it also may simply be a desire to prove to themselves that they can do a hard thing, whatever doubts they have.

Each year, long after New York’s roads have reopened and the screaming crowds have cleared out of Central Park, the New York Marathon’s last runners stumble over the finish in the dark, undeterred by the fact that the race has, technically, already ended. If you ever get gloomy about the state of the world, I suspect you’ll find redemption there, in the people making literal the adage about putting one foot in front of the other, again and again and again, until the distance in front of them shrinks to nothing.

– Ryan Lenora Brown, the Monitor’s former South Africa bureau chief, is based in Johannesburg.