On Hold

I am struggling to find my sea legs in the storm.

The reality - and Snowflake finally managed to make me admit it to myself - is that I am depressed.  And not an ordinary sense of depressed - no, this is sort of depression that is new to me.  How is it that it is new?  Because it belies the fact that most of the rest of my life is going okay.

Na Clann are doing fine in their school, their activities, and their spiritual life.  My marriage is going well.  I have a secure job with all the required benefits.  We put a contract on a house this weekend. Our cars run.  We have food in the house.  Our utilities work in summer and winter.  In other words, everything is going pretty well and I should have no reason to be depressed.  But I am.

What seems to be the hallmark of this depression?  A very real sense of entrapment.  The sense that nothing really gets better or changes for the better from here.  My work is simply that:  work, a job that I go to every day to realize that I do not have enough time to do every thing that I required to do and the larger sense that even if I did all that, it would not matter a bit.  My activities seem to lead nowhere, things that I do and redo and find that I seem to be neither getting any better nor am as satisfied with them as I used to be.

My spiritual life?  I feel a little lost in my relationship with God.  It feels as if we are blessed with so much yet seemingly I cannot find God acting in my life in a way that I am growing in my relationship with Him, a sort of spiritual holding pattern waiting for something to happen.

A holding pattern.  That describes how I feel about my life at the current time.  My life feels as if it is on hold:  everything is going fine but it seems to be going nowhere, held up by something or someone not allowing it to move on.

The hardest thing - and perhaps this is the basis of my depression - is to get up every morning knowing that today is going to be like the day before it.  By the end of it I will be tired for lack of sleep, stressed from too much work and not enough progress, and feeling that everything I do is simply running in place.

The way gets off of hold is by the person on the other end taking one off hold or hanging up and starting to call again.  But if I don't control the person (God?) on the other end and I do not even really understand where I am calling, how can I hang up?  And if I did hang up, who then would I call?