Let's Be Honest, Nobody Is Fine

On a completely different topic today - how are we all?

Not as fine as we used to be. We may have super exciting things happening in your lives and we may be super grateful for having survived a global pandemic and those elations may be masking the non-fine-ness but it’s still there. We are doggone tired. Fairly bedazzled and certainly weary. We’re fearful, tentative, unengaged and rather spent. This is not our best selves. Our most honest, most creative, most applied selves. It just isn’t our finest hour. Not by a country mile.

We’re filled with good intentions and conscious of how extensive the backlogs so we pack up WIP and hope for the best. We tug at tickets we usually could get through in this time frame but then notice we haven’t managed and that was discouraging. We look at problems that would have been a two hours head-scratch-and-Google before and we’re still stumped by them a week later and we feel stuck. Uncreative. Muted and dull somehow. And it feels like even summoning the will to be very upset about feeling this way, is one effort too far.

We’re all burned out. Not to minimise the experience of those that are severely and clinically so and how they are battling crippling anxiety and even depression, we’ll have to agree collectively we are nowhere there, but we sure aren’t ok either. Not ok and not fine. All of us.

If you take a step back and you look at this objectively, it is almost risible that we humans somehow concluded “Right, this life-threatening danger is kinda done, back to it, let’s just go back to our routine and pretend we can do all the things we used to at all the speed we used to with nary a nod to how insane this all was”. Ummm what about taking a breath? A long one? And I don’t mean that one vacay you crammed in or how you blocked an hour of “protected time” in your calendar but a contemplative, lungs-filling, life-affirming and deep-grounding-thoughts-permitting long breath.