Holding Down the Fort

So the bad news: I seem to in the midst of another depressive mood. And the good news: it seems to be almost 6 weeks since the last depression that I have had.

This, as they say, is progress.

It feels like I'm banging off walls in every aspect of my life: professional, personal. Even physical: this chest thing I seem to have acquired somewhere is just annoying enough that it keeps me from really exercising (or really sleeping well) but is not severe enough to really be "sick" - thereby ensuring I neither exercise nor truly rest.

It's as if (to use Bilbo Baggin's terms) I'm too little butter being spread across too much toast, feeling thin and stretched.

The thing that seems to be nagging at me today is the sameness of everything. It's as if I keep looking for something to happen or change, yet nothing seems to be ready to do so - or even gives a hint that it ever will.

Has it always been this way? I think back to 20+ years ago, having gotten out of graduate school with no real idea of what I was doing to do. There was change; indeed, the first three years of my post-school life were full of it: marriage, moving, music, 3 different career types. Even when I fell into my current field, there still seemed to be changes: learning new things, learning new industries, moving from company to company to learn and grow, even a bevy of new activities on my off hours.

And now, none of that seems operative.

Brian Tracy, I suppose, would tell me to get a vision of my ideal life and start working on it. The problem is even if I really knew what that is, any change of that magnitude - indeed, any change at all - seems light years from where I am today.

It's almost the mentality of holding down the fort because that's your task in life. The problem is that holding down the fort means that the ability to do anything else, or even the hope of doing something else, is put on hold because you have to stay in one place.

In all military histories, garrison duty was considered the most boring and least likely to produce any promotion or change. Garrison duty in life seems no different.