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Canadians are unarmed and did not vote for Trump. This year, however, we have the unexpected Doug Ford divide. At the Christmas feast I’m hosting, I plan to toast our premier for taking on the tariff-swinging bully to the south – “right on, Doug,” I’ll say, as I raise my glass – before being bludgeoned to death by family members shouting “bike lanes! Ontario Place!”

Enter the beachball.

“Picture it floating in the air between you and the hostile person.” The first time I shared this beachball advice was with two managers at CBC News, where I was a senior director in my final job before retiring. We were in the thicket of COVID-19, Trump, Ukraine — and, to boot, the exhausted managers were coping with an obstreperous employee.

“That beachball holds on to what is being said.” The managers and I studied my wafting ball. “It removes the conflict from you or them and instead locates it in the neutral space between you.” The beachball has no stakes in the argument; it shuns absolute truths and black-and-white thinking.

(A three-quarter life pause here: This is not unlike the older brain, which develops an elasticity of thought around sixty and continues until eighty. Young brains use each hemisphere to retrieve a particular type of information at breathless speed, but the two sides don’t meet up. Old brains recruit right and left hemispheres at the same time, uniting conflicting information on the way. That is: we get wise.)

“That beachball really worked,” one of the managers reported back. I like to think that my beachballs are helping this country’s critically important news organization run smoothly.

More recently, I gave the beachball advice to a dear friend up the street, whose family from opposite coasts of the country have moved in for a week of holiday cheer. Alan, let’s call them, can get testy with relatives, and them with Alan, so it felt important to share.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Alan called a couple days later. “I pictured a red helium balloon in the air between me and my sister.”

“It’s a pink and turquoise beachball,” I said, “But sure, a red balloon will do.”

“The balloon was filled with flammable gas, and when she wouldn’t stop talking it exploded in her face.”

I reported to my Jungian that my friend’s beachball was hostile. “Alan wanted to know why the beachball would be so pleasant and drifty after you’ve stuffed it with all your fury?”

“Beachball?” My Jungian looked astonished. “I never would have said anything about a beachball.” He might have mentioned going beyond binary equations to a place where ego and non-ego are less opposed, he explained, and I wondered where my beachball came from.

I became concerned about the veracity of the only advice I’d given in recent years. I spent the next several hours reading all the tips I could find online and in print about how to handle the holidays. To save you the trouble: I didn’t find anything better than a beachball bouncing between binary personalities before exploding in someone’s face. That’s my old brain at work, synthesizing disparate information.

In late 2018, around this time of year, the Dalia Lama tweeted something:

“We do have differences of race, nationality, religious faith and so on, but these differences are secondary in comparison to our equality in being human, ” he wrote. So wise. Note how he avoids giving advice. Perhaps he has his own beachball.

I don’t know why my mind created a floating plastic pastel orb to get me though conflicts and remind me that we’re all humans together. But I gift my coping trick to you this December. Me and my beachball wish you much joy and love.