"What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't one today."
'Groundhog Day' movie
"The groundhog is like most prophets; it delivers its prediction and then disappears."
Bill Vaughn
This has been the week for celebrations - Tuesday was Curmudgeon Day and today, February 2 is Groundhog Day, the day that little rodent casts our winter/spring fate. Notice I refrained from using one of Jimmy Cagney's lines and calling him a "dirty rat." Is there any wisdom to be gleaned from this German custom or does it just help to break the dead of winter, which as I read someplace recently is approximately from mid-January to mid-February when the temperature continues to fall in spite of the fact that the days are getting longer?
The groundhog uses whether or not he sees his shadow as an indicator for stormy weather or fair sailing. Interesting, very interesting. Could this be a clue to those "lemons" in our lives?
Carl Jung wrote: "Everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."* He felt that because of the shadow's irrational nature, it makes it more susceptible to being projected, meaning that those undesirable parts of ourselves that we have failed to reconcile with, we project onto someone else. "The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object...if it has one... or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power."* This may not sound too harmful but what happens is that these projections further hinder us by creating a denser layer of illusion between us and reality. The longer we operate by blaming others for our shortcomings, the more fog of unreality we build up around ourselves that further prevents us from taking responsible action for our lives. We become crippled, thinking that we are effectively doing something and it is others who are hindering us. This makes us powerless because others have all the control. This is just nosense - sort of like Don Quixote jousting with windmills thinking he was slaying dragons. That kind of wasted behavior will keep us mired in the status quo and not move us any further towards extraordinary.
While that is the negative aspect of the shadow, Jung also saw this dark aspect of us as the "seat of creativity."* In spite of it being our Mr Hyde to our Dr Jekyll, Jung believed it to be our saving grace, "the true spirit of life,"* as opposed to the arid land of the scholar. This fact alone makes reconciling with our dark side imperative. The purpose of life is to become more conscious of our totality - the good, the bad and the ugly - so that we can be totally alive, not to stuff more of ourselves in the darkness and hide.
It would appear that our shadow is very much like the groundhog's. It can bode fair weather or foul depending upon whether we see it or not. The dead of winter provides us with the perfect time for a little introspection. Traditionally, before the advent of artificial light and central heating, it was a time to hibernate and drowse and rest up for the more active time of the year when there would be little time for such activities. Might not be such a bad practice for us moderns to spend some quiet down time and to throw a few more hours of sleep a night into the bargain as well. Studies are showing that by sleeping nine plus hours a night in the cold dark time of the year, we can combat depression as well as a host of other conditions: heart issues, cancer, Type II diabetes and obesity.+ Just easing that darkness would go a long way towards helping us to deal with some of our unloveable characteristics more positively.
So regardless of whether old man winter or the maid of spring wins the tug-a-war of the seasons this year, by looking at our own shadow selves, we will be moving closer to extraordinary and out of the ho hum of the status quo and the dead of winter blahs.
* http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_psychology
+ Lights Out, Sleep, Sugar, and Survival, T. S. Wiley with Bent Formby, Ph.D.
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