It seems as if every conversation I am having with a friend goes something like this:
I feel that I want to do something in my life that has meaning, but I’m not sure what it is, and I’m not even sure I can get excited about anything right now.
It’s called, MALAISE (thank you, Jimmy Carter – although he never said the word malaise, his speech became known as the Malaise Speech) – we are here again where we were in the late 70s, in a malaise, a funk, a crisis of confidence if you will.
Look, I for one can tell you that today when I spoke to my friend who has had four deaths in four years and she said ENOUGH, or my other friend who says she’s just damn tired (OF EVERYTHING), or the friend today who said I just don’t even know what I want or if I care, that this is not something I’m experiencing because of my alopecia, Hashimoto’s, career change, etc etc, no, this is something we are all feeling.
It’s a GLOBAL MALAISE.
And so if we take a deep collective breath and say, MALAISE three times, then we can know that some, if not most, of this is cyclical and we are all feeling it and it’s not just us, it’s everything and we have had ENOUGH of everything, then we can sort of start to walk a little slower and look at butterflies, or swim a little and notice how our body breaks through the water, or watch the birds a little more, and always pay attention to the phases of the moon and the wonder each phase brings.
An aside: Tin came running out of his room last night with a nightmare and said that he dreamt the alarm had gone off and he bumped his head. This morning in trying to recall the nightmare he said he dreamt that the cow was jumping over the moon, and the moon was shining a light on him so bright but he knew the cow would protect him.
So think of it this way, today things look this way (MEH) and tomorrow they will look that way (OKAY) and sometimes they appear this way (YAY), and all of it is going to be okay – you just have to remember that even a malaise passes and things change.