Ideas on how to navigate a mild-to-medium funk
1. Find a place where you can be alone together. Coffee shop. Library. Sing-a-long. Spin class. No side bar chats, just head nods.
2. Eat (or feed) something. The cycle of life continues, and you can participate willingly.
3. Dig. Literally. Find a shovel.
How to endure the deep end
Same, but harder.
Keep going <3
Colorado is not a state that exhibits seasons in the adorable New England Calendar sort of linear, predictable fashion. We do snow in the summer and 70 degrees in December and might make a state slogan of being predictably unpredictable. Humans aren’t the only ones punked by our temperamental temperment… I know a thousand trees and a sorry patch of daffodils who bloomed early enough that our heavy, early April snow storm squandered them. This middling season grates at me, leaving me wearing the wrong shoes and being either far too hot or (more often) too cold, with half of my wardrobe in the backseat of my car, ready for the mid-day switcheroo.
Boots, flats, and sandals, and then back again by evening. Palindromic dressing.
Sometimes, I’m able to stay quite positive and happy about this silly game - joking with my shivering flip flop clad fellows with our collars popped in vain against the cold as we wait for our dogs to do their business, but more often than I’d like, I find myself facing the early morning drizzle with an instagram full of the blossoming trees of Central Park and a grouchy face. I get mad at the dog, who is also not thrilled about the prospect of sniffing out the just-right patch of water-logged grass in which to do her business. Much is green and much is brown.
So. Much. Is. Brown.
Seasons of life are like this too, I suppose. Not the linear progression through milestones, but the meandering and circular ways in which we sometimes feel as though we shouldn’t feel the way we feel.
Adorable.
I notice this inner languishing that unfolds for me, punctuated by episodes of unproductivity. Antiproductivity? These are apparently not words, in the reformed sense, but it is absolutely a feeling where I am tired of being productive and forward thinking and languish, staring into space and then filling my calendar with new and more so that the empty doesn’t swallow me.
Grief is no stranger in my bag of emotional tricks, which is wild in the face of my particular flavor - intangible loss. Tangible loss is not better or worse, but its measurability makes it different somehow. When someone is dead and buried, they are gone*. When I learned that Jon had died and was buried, I drove immediately to his grave because the cyberobituary was too ethereal, and my need was tangibility. I needed to touch the headstone and pour an espresso into the earth that is his designated spot for the coming few centuries.
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