ABCs and PhD’s: Time for a recharge
By Liz Stockwell June 2, 2010 6:30 am
It’s damp. It’s dreary. As I write this, I look out my window and fog obscures the mid-morning light. After a teasing May taste of summer, the sun seems to have disappeared and with it my get-up-and-go. Why should I be in such a slump when I’m thankful for so much in my life? It’s after days like these that my brain thinks the middle of the night is the best time to stir the stew of worries in my head. No concern is too trivial—“The basil plants I paid $1.25 for are shrivelling up! What’s happened to my career? Those wrong notes I sang in choir last night were so embarrassing! I’m a bad parent—am I raising future axe murderers? ” This kind of thinking just makes everything worse, and of course I feel tired the next day.
The current June-uary weather we’re having here in the Pacific Northwest certainly doesn’t help my mood. And the funny part is I just had a vacation to a warm sunny place! I should be fired up and ready to take on the world. Instead I’m dealing with a case of the blahs. My drained batteries are fortunately rechargeable under the right circumstances. Unless I’m in the right frame of mind, though, tried and true tricks to get me out of my funk don’t work. My rechargeable batteries (apologies for the obvious metaphor) only accept a charge if they’re configured in just the right way. It’s not enough just to find the recharger; I have to be ready to receive the charge. Or sometimes it takes a push to overcome the stiffness to mesh the connections.
Reading for pleasure often works, but I learned I have to be careful about content. The other
