“Languishing” they call It

It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

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. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.

As scientists and physicians work to treat and cure the physical symptoms of long-haul Covid, many people are struggling with the emotional long-haul of the pandemic. It hit some of us unprepared as the intense fear and grief of last year faded” (Grant).

Last week, everyone read The New York Times article, everyone nodded a yes, and I too thought, this is exactly what I am feeling after this past year. Before I read the piece, I had coined the sense as ‘mopey’. Just that downcast and defeated feeling after a hard year of cynicism and despair might leave you moping around your living room. 

 

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Earth Day

Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs, —
To the silent wilderness,
Where the soul need not repress its music.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley

As a Nine Cent Girl reader you are uniquely aware of the lovely places where I roam and know many are right out my front door. Having the very best of air, water, earth, with a fire in our hearth keep us balanced on this one small planet. This week as Spring is slowly emerging from her underworld and winter garb, there is the reminder that Persephone is rising with her mantle of yellow flowers and cape of greens. As all New Englanders, I anxiously await the ease this next season will bring and am always reminded how lucky I am to live here, in absolute beauty: under grey clouds or vast blue, each day is a gift.

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time traveling

Is there anything more delightful than sailing into Venice, watching as the waterfront slowly takes shape, delightful small boats darting about the harbor and the bell tower of St Mark’s Basilica up ahead ringing in your arrival? Seriously, that occasion is a memory I hold dear, as one does the sweet air. Perhaps you also keep a cherished moment in time where everything came together like magic? When the mist rose at dawn and illuminated the mountain ridge? When you spotted a bald eagle soaring overhead? When the Ferris wheel held you and your bestie at the very top just as the summer sun set into a whole sky of orange and pink? We all have those sacred moments lingering right under this same now, don’t we?

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