I’ve been avoiding social media and broadcast news since before the election, but I’ve been enough in touch to see a lot of pleas for love, peace, and harmony in the body politic.

It would be nice if America became the Peanuts gang singing around Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, which has become full and beautiful in an instant simply because we cared for it.

But I doubt that’s how it works. The body politic is the last place where we should expect to find love, peace, and harmony. (Or at least one of the last places. I can think of other candidates.)

The first place where we can expect to find love is right here: in me, in you, and in our relationships with the people we see and hear and touch with our physical senses, right here, right now.

It’s no use trying to develop empathy for people in some different-colored state who voted differently than I did if I can’t even feel for the person behind the counter who snaps at me when I hold up the lunch line.

If love ever appears in the body politic—a point on which I hold absolutely no hope except to hope that I’m wrong—it will be because a whole lot of people got a whole lot better at loving themselves, their family, their friends, their coworkers and boss, their customers, their bus driver, their barista, the drivers of the cars around them, and the guy down the street who does their dry cleaning.

How do we become more loving toward the people in our immediate vicinity? Here are a few ideas:

• Remember your own faults (but don’t magnify their importance).
• Get enough sleep.
• Make time for the people and activities that feed your soul.
• Turn off your devices.
• Accept the things you cannot change – which includes absolutely everything that other people do, say, or think.
• Treat mealtimes like special occasions.
• Practice mindfulness.
• Walk in the woods, in the park, on the beach – or even, if it’s icy, in Home Depot.
• Eat chocolate.
• Imagine what it’s like to be the other person.
• Pray.
• Listen to a child.
• Listen to the birds.
• Listen to people who are older and wiser than you are.
• Listen to anything that is not the chattering monkeys in the circus in your head.

And, to top it off, two communication-related ideas:

• Speak and write only what you know to be true.
• Use kind words (starting with how you talk to yourself about yourself).

These are things that I at least sometimes try to do—emphasis on the try—to become a more loving person. How about you? What are your ideas for promoting love, peace, and harmony in these waning days of 2016?

If my wishing can make it so, all three will be yours this holiday season.