Ebb & Flow
Over the past week or so, I have been in a state most people would characterize as “depressed.”
What? Aren’t you the guy who literally wrote the book on how to live a kick ass life?
Yeah. I said most people.
Most people have a horrible lack of insight in the natural patterns in their own lives.
They notice they don’t feel so good, thinking maybe they’re depressed or worse. Maybe you need some pills for that. There are pills for everything these days.
The difference in the state I was in was that I was detached from it. I immediately recognized it as the natural ebb and flow of how things work. It is all cyclical. Everything expands and contracts all the time, whether you want it to or not.
When you stay in “expansion” mode for too long, and you force yourself to keep moving, then the body will not tolerate that. It will forcibly shut you down, and then you say you are burnt out. Or in my case, I caught a nasty flu-like thing. Fever, murderous headaches, constant dizziness, etc. Yeah, that was fun. But I recognized it for what it was. Then I am now gradually easing out of it. I’m no longer physically ill, but I’m still slowly working my way out of “contraction” and into “expansion” mode.
The lesson is that, a lot of the time when you think something is going terribly wrong, it isn’t. It is just moving through the natural cyclical pattern of how everything works. There’s a natural pacing to everything.
The more you pay attention to the world around you in general, and to yourself in particular, the more you will start to see this for yourself... and more importantly, you can start to act in accordance with it. That’s life in the flow.
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Blogging challenge: I will be posting 5-6 days a week for the next 30 days. I still have a couple dozen unpublished post that will never see the light of day. I’ve been writing daily posts for a while now, and only publishing my favorites once a week. But now, I need to generate some momentum after not writing much at all for ~2 weeks. So I’ll be publishing everything just to keep myself accountable.
Blog platform: As you may notice, this ain’t wordpress. Tynan has spent the past couple of years developing a new, kick-ass blog platform called SETT. It isn’t ideal for everything, but for what I want for this blog, it beats the pants off of wordpress.
Today’s writing music: The Party & The After Party - The Weeknd