These past few months I’ve felt a growing hope, joy, gratitude, and ease…and also that it’s amazing to feel this way in the midst of the accelerated and challenging collective experience of the past two years.

At times I have felt dull and unmotivated, as if the New York Times was speaking right to me when Adam Grant published his piece, There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing, what he describes as a dulling of focus and motivation, a sense of stagnation and emptiness that can feel like a muddling through the days. And muddle I did.

One day somewhere in 2020 (What a blur! Even the seasons seemed like One Whole Long Run-on Never-ending Time), I noticed I’d stopped doing my daily ritual and meditation practice. The rituals had become special occasions and the meditation whenever I felt like it. I was shocked. I’d been steady and committed for years. When did this happen? Why aren’t I doing more of what feels grounding and meaningful, not less?

I didn’t push myself. I didn’t judge, just went about my days. In some ways, life looked much the same, the only sticking point being that nothing interrupted that sameness, the external pleasures and the joy of being with others permanently on hold. The languishing I’d read about, what the author posited as the predominant emotion of 2021, was making sense.

Yet, somehow in all of it, I kept writing and writing and writing. In August, I finished the draft of a book, ironically given my confession, about ritual, half stories and half guide to crafting genuine and mindful ceremony, alone, with others, and for the benefit of the planet.

Apparently I wrote through to the other side of languishing (see NYT follow up piece The Other Side of Languishing is Flourishing). My ritual practice deepened and my daily meditation resumed, as did my hope, joy, gratitude and ease. I wondered, Maybe those lulls we have are our teachers. Maybe life’s troughs are just as necessary to our growth as the peaks.

I still feel that blah sometimes. My familiar friends, lack of focus and lack of motivation, sit down with me often. But now, from the position of both looking back and being, like it or not, still in this weird, enlightening collective experience, I no longer see flourishing and languishing as opposites. I think they are indicative of the paradox of life, the way suffering and joy coexist.

So, instead of measuring and fixing the languishing/ flourishing experience, I’m going to re-remember what writing through a pandemic taught me: keep going, and love yourself through all of it. Because, here's the thing: The salve for the hard times and the sparkle for the good times is rooted in the same place: Within You. That's right, inside the beautiful, glorious You and me and all of us is the source of all love and power. And we long for this pure love, this connection to self. Believing that we are loved and lovable, that it's inherent, built-in, not achieved, never lost, present right now just as we are....this is self-love, and it's the answer.

Witness you. Honor you. Love you. Then love you some more.