Over the years, I’ve often found myself returning to that old idiom about “ebbs and flows,” finding its succinctness useful as a kind of shorthand for the constant unpredictability of everyday life.

By now, I’ve come to embrace those sudden shifts, those quick transitions between ebbs and flows, but this isn’t to say that they don’t affect me. Mainly, I think, I’ve just become more accustomed to their presence, more skilled at riding the highs and more comfortable with enduring the lows. Every so often, though, and usually when I’m just coming off of some major accomplishment, I’ll be hit with a slump of such unshakable magnitude that it will completely floor me, leaving me wholly inconsolable and entirely incapable of getting anything done until it passes.

In those cases, I’ve realized, there is absolutely nothing I can do to improve the situation, nothing that will pull me out of it other than the passage of time. Contrary to my every impulse, it seems that the best thing for me to do in those moments is just to settle in, to get cozy with the discomfort until it moves on. And although it never moves on so quickly as I would like, it does always move on eventually, does take its leave of me once it feels its work has been done.

I’m eager to point out, though, that I say this very deliberately, that part about “feeling its work has been done,” for I really do think that there is work being done in those moments, do think that those slumps are of some value. I like to see it as a kind of mandatory return-to-center, a maintaining of a personal equilibrium: the flows pushing us out, and, regardless of how far we may get, the ebbs reeling us back in.

It’s a push-pull motion that’s constantly returning us to the beginning — constantly forcing us to backtrack on whatever progress we’ve made — but, even so, I like to think of this strange phenomenon as a constructive one. After all, it does provoke one of two rather useful outcomes, this constant back and forth between ebb and flow: it either draws us back so that we’re reminded of why we started (and, in turn, reminded of why we must continue), or, like a concerned but well-meaning friend, it pulls us aside to question whether or not we really want to keep going.

Waving from my desk,
– J