Divine Discontent

     Suffice it to say, my year has not started out as I envisioned. Matter of fact, it hardly feels like it's taken off at all...
     For the record, January 1st is my favorite of all holidays. I block it off for silence. I pile up with new planning calendars, new journals, new Sharpies and flippy charts to brainstorm my fool head off. I LOVE blank pages and lined notebooks that invite me to list everything swirling about as my crazy head attempts to capture on paper what most needs doing, or contemplated...or scratched off the list all together.
     But a funny thing happened on the way to my new year...
     Life happened.
     For starters, goat babies started coming at odd intervals. (You've got to stop when new life comes in; they can't help it that their mom's waited 5 months to deliver in the midst of holidays, snow days...whatever days.) Not all of them made it. With these I lost a day to raw grief; with the survivors I lost more days in humble gratitude. (Either way, I was losing days to goat babies...Or, viewed another way, I was living my days with a more prioritized focus. It's all in the perspective I'm learning.)
     Second, not one, not two, not three, but FOUR of my friends died...People I love...People who touched my life...Some I knew were sick, but most I had no warning. One day I'm leaving a message; next day I'm seeing a Facebook post. I know it's life. I've got no monopoly on losing people. (It happens even more often as you age.) But it seemed a sucker punch to the gut to have so many in such a short window. I finally just kept my black skirt folded across the tub for easy access. (Honest to God, it's there right now.)
     But more than anything external (deeply affecting my internal), I began to notice something else was missing: my drive. For some reason, my desire to get things done had taken a nosedive. Some days I was hard pressed to get out of bed...(It's why I keep goats and cute puppies around. Walking Prozac. No time for pity parties when there are mouths to feed, plus, nothing lifts your spirits like the innocent creatures or Roz's precious face. I had no choice but to show up.  I was just moving slower than usual and I was digging deeper in the silence of my morning routines...listening for answers...watching for clues as to what the heck was happening?
     Could this be Depression? (I didn't want to check out, I was simply indifferent...noncommittal...non-motivated.  Projects that once consumed my creative drive were now met with a wall of overwhelm, leaving me to ask "Why bother?" or "Do I really feel up for that today?"
      In talking with friends, I'm discovering I'm not alone. I've got friends battling cancer; friends who've lost jobs; friends recovering from surgery... Others (most all) voice concern for their finances, if not the economy on the whole. No. This isn't just me. I think there's something in the air and like some sort of mental flu, it's contagious. Only nobody seems to want to acknowledge the elephant in the room.
     To process it all in one fell swoop is mind boggling. It was too much to handle. No. I was forced to tackle only the things I could handle in one day and leave the rest for later. For the first time in my life I decided NOT to make a list as lists now served to depress me seeing how much of them DIDN'T get crossed off.
     Then it hit me. De javu all over again. I had been here before. A long time ago...freshly out of college. I was eager to embrace my first job in a career I had trained for...a gig I had bragged about. I moved into my first apartment...Met all new people. A lot of change, and one day: splat. I was miserable...I had miscalculated. I felt guilt for not loving what I was doing as much as I thought I would; I felt tired for working against the flow of my usually upbeat and creative life force just to keep my head above water; I felt lost.
     Thinking back on my twenties, I was reliving those very feelings (if only we could tell ourselves then what we've come to learn now) when I turned the question forward asking "What advice would your 70-something self tell your 50-something self today?"
     The answer? "Brace yourself Evins. This isn't depression. What you're feeling is CHANGE. And the odd thing about change is it packs with it, a total loss of anything familiar...(If it was familiar, it would not be change now, would it?) What I was feeling was what I've now come to call "Divine Discontent" meaning, "Something's about to give."
     If I've learned anything from life especially since moving to the country, it's that life lives you. You may THINK you're going to the store today, but if a goat's in labor or you need to wait on a vet, you can get by another day on crackers. You may THINK you're heading into the city for business talks, but if a snow storm leaves cars strewn up and down I-40, you're gonna heed those anchors who say "If you don't absolutely HAVE to be out in it, stay home!"
     Most of all, I've learned to be forgiving. I'm fairly good at it with others. (Takes too much energy to hold a grudge and I've got better uses for that energy.) But I haven't always been so forgiving with myself. But today, for the sake of my sanity, I must.  I don't have enough energy to be lost, be present AND beat myself up for not sticking to "Today's To Do's" or for breaking more than half of my resolutions one month in.
     So here's to February 1st. New month. New days ahead. New attempts to figure it out.
     One thing I know for sure...One thing I recall from my 20-something encounter with this "funk energy" ...get uncomfortable enough and smart people will stop and allow the change....invite it, even...WELCOME it. You can only walk with a pebble in your shoe for so long before it forms a blister, at which point you WILL have to stop and take off the shoe. Why not stop before the blister forms? (Surely SOME wisdom comes with age.)
     Perhaps it means what you THOUGHT you wanted to do, isn't what you are REALLY supposed to be doing...or what you intended to tackle, you're actually not even GOOD at (so get ready for another new one Evins...how 'bout this time you ask for help? Or better yet, ditch those items from the list all together.)
     Life, I'm learning, is about adjusting our sails. Were we to set out on a sailboat, headed straight to some tropical isle, it would not be one solid, locked-in-place rudder that would get me there. It would be an endless series of back-and-forth, back-and-forth moves of the rudder that would navigate me home.
     To those of you who've reached out, shared similar sensations or are feeling it too...May you take comfort in knowing you are not alone. This feeling I call "Divine Discontent" begins in a space that doesn't feel quite right anymore...Maybe you've outgrown it. Or maybe what you were doing was training you for something yet to come. Either way, the fact that it forces you to dig deeper to find out what does bring that bliss thing back around, I'm all for digging.