Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.  It’s the void between depression and flourishing – the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity.*
(Adam Grant)

The secret to diagnosing the problem with a broken scene lies in its subtext.**
(Robert McKee)

Whether as a result of the pandemic or because the doldrums are where you’ve increasingly found yourself recently, there are ways to get moving again.

One basic way is to introduce more physical movement to the day.

Then move your thinking and feeling with reading, watching and listening to new things, feeding your imagination and spirit.

Capture all of this in journaling and then look for the smallest iterations of ideas that come to you to try out: moving your doing.

As Robert McKee suggests, the brokenness lies in the subtext, Peter Senge would concur: it’s not the reinforcing system/behaviour that we see on the surface where the issueless, it’s the balancing system/stuff beneath the surface we need to tackle.^

Keep pushing the reinforcing behaviour and things will likely become worse. Slow down, go deeper, and explore the balancing world and something new will appear.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul sense the world that awaits you.^^

*Adam Grant, quoted in Sam Radford’s blog: Languishing, the neglected middle child of mental health;
**From Robert McKee‘s newsletter: The Secret to Fixing Broken Scenes;
^See Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline;
^^From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For a New Beginning.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.*
(John O’Donohue)

By choosing form, he’d be setting up to become an explorer. His goal to discover all that the form is capable of.**
(Scott McCloud)

What is “it”?

How has it been done before?

How will you do it?

Or perhaps you will do something completely different?

As species after species passes on their genes, what we’d notice – if we could hang around a mighty long time – is that each generation basically does what the last generation did.

Then we come to humans, able to change direction in an instant and do something differently or even to pursue something that’s never been done before.

Here’s how John O’Donohue’s blessing begins:

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you are ready to emerge.*

*From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For a New Beginning;
**From Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

As short as the time
From spark to flame,
So brief may the distance be
Between heart and being.
…
May courage
Cause our hearts to flame,
In the name of the Fire,
And of the Flame
And the Light.*
(John O’ Donohue)

In her book Strengths Based Parenting, Mary Reckmeyer tells the stories of fashion designer Jason Wu and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, examples of pursuing passions from an early age – both supported by their parents from before the age of 10 in what they were becoming interested in.

Whilst these stories show us how it is possible for someone’s curiosity can become an interest and turn into a flaming passion, they may leave us believing we are too late when it comes to pursuing passion.

This is just not so.

John O’Donohue offers us the image of spark to a flame to illustrate how things can so quickly alter.

We need only start by noticing what we notice and lean into this.

I was reminded of the Jesuit steps** that allowed them to pursue what they most wanted to pursue in life, these being self-awareness, innovation, love, and courage:

It takes courage to specialise and build a small great thing.^

Courage is the product of our pursuit of interest: we will be most courageous about those things that matter most to us.

Onwards!, because it is not too late:

Knowledge allows us to get our bearings, but it’s imagination and action that give us the forward motion we need to start and finish.^^

*From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: In Praise of Fire;
**Check out Chris Lowney’s Heroic Leadership;
^From Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: A Small Great Thing;
^^From Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: Start to Finish.

Society wants us to I’ve a planned existence, following paths that have been travelled by others. Tried and true. The known, the expected, the controlled, the safe. The path of the wanderer is not this. The path of the wanderer is an experiment with the unknown. To idle. To daydream.*
(Keri Smith)

I bring the concept of Shabbat to all the artists I work with. … On this day, I instruct them, they can tend to their bodies, relationships, homes rest, leisure, and all else that becomes neglected through the week of living in late capitalism.**
(Beth Pickens)

For more than thirty years every weekend was taken up with work.

I always struggled to make up the time with family and self.

I am learning.

*From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society;
**From Beth Pickens’ Make Your Art No Matter What.

When something is forgotten, the heart/mind no longer sees it. You could there translate [Dogen Zenji’s] “self-forgetting” this way: “When we study the self it disappears.”*
(Lewis Hyde)

Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisite for growth?: the openness to experience events, and the willingness to be changed by them.**
(Warren Berger)

The 13th century Zen master Dogen Zenji taught:

to study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be verified by all things.*

These words caught my attention because of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s discoveries about flow, that we are the least aware of self when we are involved in something that takes us out of ourselves and into the activity:

flow – the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it … “Flow” is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake … Flow avoids both selfishness and conformity^.

This description can cover all kinds of activities, but, for me, the highest pursuit is the understanding of our True Self and the contribution we can male that result in both flow and the experience of opening the mind, heart and will to the other, finding ourselves in wonder and possibility and creation.

Towards losing the self in the flow of your life try writing out your values. Not just as a list of words, but dig deeply into them, drawing out more and more nuance: you may wish to ask the question Why does this matter to me? five times to help with this. Also, to ask how do you want to include more people in this value.

May I live this day

Compassionate of heart,
Clear in word,
Gracious in awareness,
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love.^^

*From Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting;
**From Warren Berger’s Glimmer;
^From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow;
^^From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: Matins.

Most innovative projects … tend to begin with someone venturing out into the world, looking around, and noticing a problem or need.*
(Warren Berger)

What is the new horizon in you that wants to be seen?**
(John O’Donohue)

The way we describe our gods may well be the way we want to be ourselves, inquisitive and flabbergasted by human potential:

Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful. The Lord protects the simple; when I was brought low, he saved me. Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.^

How do we become more gracious, righteous, merciful, protecting, saving, bountiful?

Hannah Arendt wrote about how:

Forgiving is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly.^^

Arendt is pointing to something new that didn’t exist before, the product of a generative being: which we all are.

Those we remember and honour most are most likely to have expressed the qualities and characteristics found in the psalm. We hear and read and see their stories of goodness and are reminded that we all have the potential to be better than we are in this moment.

Warren Berger encourages us to step outside of our world and take a look around.

Our curiosity will lead us to something new that we can begin, and beginnings are the gateways to becoming, as John O’Donohue proffers:

Through the innocence of beginning we are often seduced into growth.**

May we take a look around today, notice what is emerging for us, and step into a beginning.

*From Warren Berger’s Glimmer;
**From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
^Psalm 116:5-7
^^Hannah Arendt, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting.

The Greeks believed that time had secret structure There was the time of ‘epiphany’ when time suddenly opened and something was revealed in luminous clarity. There was the moment of ‘krisis’ when time got entangled and directions became confused and contradictory. There was also the moment of ‘kairos’; this was the propitious moment.*
(Lewis Hyde)

To live a conscious life, we need to constantly refine our listening.**
(John O’Donohue)

What time is it?

Not the time of day, but where you find yourself in what you must do?

There’s a time to work and a time to rest.

There’s a time to wait and be open and receive.

And there’s a time to wrestle with what’s important to you when it’s not going right.

There’s a time to continue working at something because it’s not finished.

And there’s a time to stop what you’re doing and deliver.

All of these are legitimate times and accepting this allows us to listen to the times and use them well in service to what we must do:

We must face the fact that we have a responsibility to own what’s possible. Opportunity abounds And that’s both a comforting and a scary thought.^

*From Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting;
**From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
^From Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: The Bounds of Possibility.

You must become a beginner.*
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

Beginning precedes us, creates us, and constantly takes us to new levels and places and people.**
(John O’Donohue)

Stale? Stuck? Failed? Bored? Arrived? Wronged? Discarded? Disregarded? Unemployed?

You’re made for beginning again:

Perhaps the art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives is best achieved when we place profound trust in the act of beginning. Risk might be our greatest ally. To live a truly creative life, we always need to cast a critical look at where we presently are, attempting always to discern where we have become stagnant and where new beginning might be opening.**

Beginning is the destination of the ever-curious, the always-exploring, the never-ending.

*Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in Tom Vanderbilt’s Beginners;
**From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus.

In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all.*
(Nassim Taleb)

Yesterday, I was able to sit awhile in a walled garden and simply be for a while.

In such moments the things that matter most come to us: the richness and importance of all that fills our lives coming to the surface.

Yet these places of quietness are taken away from us in the modern life promising that we need never be bored or alone, seeing it as strange if we desire either.

It doesn’t have to be for long. Set a timer for 4′ 33″ and simply open your senses, beginning with listening. If you have longer then just be open to thoughts and feelings. Whether something emerges or not doesn’t matter.

may you find your
places of thin silence
to rest without distraction
to be open without rush

*From Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness.

The gift of the world is our first blessing.*
(John O’Donohue)

The function of the artist is the mytholisation of the environment and the world.**
(Joseph Campbell)

Coming to the end of his book about love, Jonah Lehrer writes,

The world is defined by scarcity: there’s never enough of anything.^

What we forget and must remember, though, is that,

Each life is clothed in raiment of spirit that secretly links it to everything else.*

Abundance is discovered in connection, and this discovery leads us into our creative artfulness: we have enough time, security, talent. Indeed, these may come from something deep within us and we’re not sure how it got there:

We are all haunted by something deep inside us, and often a lot of our best work is the result of us trying to come to terms with this.^^

*From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
**From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth;
^From Jonah Lehrer’s A Book About Love;
^^From gapingvoid’s blog: Spiritual redemption.