Flourishing. Languishing. Savoring.
It’s been about 450 days since lockdown measures started here in Amsterdam. The announcement was made a week before I was booked to see family and friends in the Philippines and Singapore. It was an utterly chaotic week of fight or (literal) flight thoughts in my head. Since then, every response measure has triggered some new curve or flip in the longest emotional rollercoaster - hello world? I’d like to get off now please!
The last few weeks have sucked. I tried to think of a more eloquent way to articulate this but this is what I really mean so I’m just going to go with it. It was already the second week of May and the weather had not turned, I still needed my winter coat on most days, and my friends in the States were pretty much fully vaccinated and making travel plans. I was just stuck. Earlier in May, organizational psychologist, Adam Grant, had written an article for the New York Times identifying and defining Languishing and after reading it, I pretty much gave myself permission to just languish.
I ate bags (plural) of Doritos, watched Bridgerton all over again while scrolling Instagram endlessly - worst of all, I started using my phone again to “put me to sleep” which led to me being consistently under-slept and over-caffeinated. I must admit, it felt good for a few days then I got anxious and guilty about unlearning all the good habits I had taught myself over the past year and pretty much stressed myself out from being so far from this ideal I had created in my head.
In the article, Adam Grant wrote: “Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work.” - this was exactly it for me, I couldn’t find any satisfaction at work with a job that I actually like nor with the personal projects I had just so enthusiastically started (this site included). He offers “flow” as an antidote, which is ironic because up until I had allowed myself to languish I was actually keeping up with many things I had adjusted in my life as part of flow optimization coaching I had just partaken in.
I was - still am, actually - so intent on making something worthwhile out of the time the pandemic has “returned” to us. But who am I kidding, it’s still the same 24 hours in a day; it's not like there was suddenly a day between Sunday and Monday. I went on to read the next NYT article which now identified and defined Flourishing. By sheer coincidence, I had just encountered the word as I was looking to name a work project so I really dove into what it meant to flourish and how to get there because heaven forbid I be in any other state that wasn’t considered optimal. Ugh. I really am my own worst enemy.
“People think that in order to flourish, they need to do whatever their version of winning the Olympics is, or climbing a mountain, or having some epic experience”
First of all, I was happy to learn by way of these articles that flourishing did not mean accomplishing whatever my version is of winning a gold in the olympics.
Here’s how I’ve been coping:
Re-visiting the habits I had developed one at a time, starting with creating alarms for taking my vitamins and supplements as well as consciously drinking 8 glasses of water a day. I probably already was drinking 8 glasses a day, but doing it consciously made me feel like I could give myself a gold star before going to bed! Yes, I may have undid everything in a matter of days but it took me over a year to build up these good things whereas I had developed the things I wanted to change over years, so defaulting was simply going back to what I had been used to for years - in other words, for me, that’s what normal felt like! It took energy to keep up with all the new, and languishing took away the focus from that energy.
I took some time to reassess why I really started this site and this blog - hence the two week hiatus! Not only is it a passion project to cultivate the recently discovered thrill I get from writing but it’s also my new challenge in the sense that I’m fully diving into digital and social marketing. Thank you all for your patience because as it turns out, you’ve become my guinea pigs. Also, tackling this means progress towards what’s called High Hard Goals by the Flow Research Collective. This stopped the spiral of thoughts around how I had created personal work, on top of actual work and brought back the joy in spending my Sundays writing and planning content.
I am actively practicing Savoring which is acknowledging small moments. It’s the season for annual performance assessments at work and a colleague shared feedback which read: “Remember to look back to see what you’ve accomplished and focus on the journey as much as the end-state”. It’s been an unprecedented year, so finding a way to move forward in spite of all the uncertainty is progress. I’ve always operated and derived energy from the “what’s next”, it’s only just now that I realized that the “what have I done so far” was also an energy source - admittedly not the same levels, but given the times I’ll take what I can get.
Last, but not least, Adam Grant mentions in his article that: “Psychologists find that one of the best strategies for naming emotions is to name them. “ and I must admit, not only has this made me feel better it has also widened my vocabulary and made me more purposeful in how I communicate. So until recently, when the vaccination distribution had sped up, I was feeling Despair, now that communication on appointment scheduling is updated frequently I have become Hopeful, but I am still Apprehensive. But it’s ok to not be ok, right?
Literally stopping to smell the flowers. Bottles were repurposed Olive Oil and Soy Sauce bottles.
