Surviving at Work - 1: Recognizing the Symptoms
Posted by JohnD
There are days that begin in difficult moods, and I start writing down what I’m going through to see if I can shake myself loose. Here’s what I wrote one morning last week. .......I keep sinking away into a deep pool of stillness. Looking outside this morning, I see that the season’s first rain showers came before dawn. After so much dryness, the slick sheen of water seems strange. Everything is damp and chilly, the sky is dark with the rain-weighted clouds, and I keep staring out the window at the garden, the bare yard beyond that, and across the street to an old barn in an open field. It’s a good thing I don’t have to rush to work this morning because my body doesn’t want to move at all. I’ll stay here, connecting remotely, trying to get things done, then go to my meeting late this afternoon. But I’m feeling this stillness getting into me, a kind of comfortable, let’s-sit-and-stare into-the-fathomless-world feeling. A rich depth opens in my chest. I wish it were the warmth preceding a good writing spell, but really it’s more like falling into emptiness, a state where I will do nothing if I don’t activate soon. Writing these lines is a mechanism to turn my mind from emptiness to the beginnings of movement. Work feels miles away and alien – I guess I’m really drifting off. I’ll stop now, get cleaned up and dressed for the day, then come back later. This drugged state of floating seems to lift me easily onto a smoothly flowing cloud that will take me somewhere intensely pleasant. But I know it’s nothing but sleep, a lazy turning round and round, dreamlike days – I’m unconnected to anything. At least there is no fear and panic, everything is muted, distant, like living in the midst of a soft warm fog.
Two Hands (Rights Reserved)
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