Hopelessness

Another moment of epiphany this morning.

I was mulling over yesterday, as I walked through the hot and humid day of New Home enjoying our semi-local Animal Theme Park, about the fact that even though it was a weekend and I was spending the day with An Teaglach, I was not really all that happy. Not really unhappy mind you; just not all that happy. Heat, humidity, large crowds of people: certainly I'm not fan of any of them. But below the surface of all that was general silence of the soul: not angry, not upset, just sort of placid and soot colored.

If I thought about it, that tends to reflect my mood most days: not angry or upset, just placid and soot colored. When I get up, when I go to work, when I come home from work, when I interact with my family, when I go to bed: virtually the same.

So why is this? What explains this sort of bland melange of unenthused action and feeling?

A loss of hope.

I've lost hope - temporal hope, anyway. I've essentially lost hope that my life is going to be able to change for the better in any meaningful way.

Meaningful way? It can relate to any number of things: finances, relationships, job, goals, impact. There is just a subconscious crushing sense of the fact that no matter what I do it will make precisely no difference. It's the sense of all your efforts being poured down a hole, washed away forever.

Again, it's not depression (How well I know that feeling!). It's not despondency - although it may share some attributes of despondency in the sense of "the uselessness of further action". It's the sense that no matter what is done, it will simply make no difference.

How does one combat such a thing when it permeates the very air that one breathes? When every time you go for a day, or even a week of not thinking about it you suddenly come crashing back down to earth with the sense of "Nothing is changing, no matter what I do".

How do you soldier on in the face of a desolate landscape when your getting no closer to the edge of the desert?