Lenten Journey: Languishing and Flow

Early in my professional ministry, I was officiating a memorial service for a young mother. Her teenage son came to me and said something so profound that it has stuck with me 22 years later. I don’t recall the precise quote but it was essentially, “I don’t know if I feel the way I do because my mother just died or because ALL of my friends seem to be having big emotions right now.” For someone so young, he had enormous insight into the complexity of human emotions.

In the weeks leading up to Ash Wednesday, I was doing some reflecting about a kind of malaise I had been feeling. As I journaled about this, some things became clearer and others more confusing. As the Covid pandemic approached, my beloved Uncle John died… and I completed the last of eight months of chemotherapy… that began less than a year after my mother’s death. As the pandemic progressed, my father-in-law died in October, my mother-in-law died in February, and then my own father died in July. So, as I journaled, I became more aware that all of those deaths had piled up my grief in a way that I was still struggling to process. But I also became aware that the Covid pandemic had created several losses that I was also grieving – loss of routines, loss of experiences, loss of security, and, in some ways, loss of time. So, what was the cause of my malaise? Was it the deaths I experienced in the last three years or was it the grief that so many of us are experiencing at this point in the Covid pandemic?

I may never know the answer to that question but another culprit has come to my awareness recently. In her homily at the Ash Wednesday service I attended, Samantha Bronson referenced a New York Times article by Dr. Adam Grant. In the article, Dr. Grant names “Languishing” as the “neglected middle child of mental health.” Languishing is quite literally the “middle child” in that it exists in between flourishing and depression. Rather than feeling exuberant and productive or despondent and exhausted, one feels, as Dr. Grant so eloquently puts it, “Meh.”

Unlike clinical depression, languishing is marked by apathy. The primary symptom is not loathing (of self, others, or life) but indifference. Lack of motivation, dullness… malaise.

So, before we set out further on our Lenten Journey where we explore our emotional and spiritual drives, we might do well to notice whether our drives have been dulled. Your malaise may exist on a spectrum so take inventory of your life at this moment without judgment about extremes. Have you noticed a lack of motivation in some aspect of your life? Maybe the inability to travel has dulled your interest to experience new things more generally. Maybe the routineness of Covid-informed days has left you less motivated in the morning to start your day with the same enthusiasm you once had.

As you take inventory, I would not leave you without an antidote to this languishing. As Dr. Grant notes, “During the early days of the pandemic, the best predictor for well-being wasn’t optimism or mindfulness – it was flow.” Flow is the opposite of distraction. Flow is a condition of focus in which you are immersed in something so engaging, challenging, or novel that it holds your attention uniquely as opposed to multi-tasking which, although it is a valuable and necessary skill in 21^st century life, does not need to be an aspiration or badge of self-worth.

Achieving flow does not need to be as time-consuming as learning to make sourdough bread or a new language. Although if either of those things appeal to you, go for it! The key to finding flow is being engaged. But the other key to finding flow is protecting your time. Dr. Grant notes, “That means carving out daily time to focus on a challenge that matters to you – an interesting project, a worthwhile goal, a meaningful conversation.”

From my experience teaching mindfulness practices, I would also recommend that you start small. Just like someone who is new to meditation should not expect to sit for two hours the first time out or even half an hour. Find something that engages you and then protect the time to be focused on it for whatever time feels most appropriate to the activity and to your ability. Spend 15 minutes on a jigsaw puzzle or an hour trying a new recipe. But then, PROTECT that time and give yourself to it fully.

So, invite you to take inventory of your own sense of languishing wherever it falls on a spectrum from mild languishing to significant. And then, in the days to come, find some time each day to enter into flow.

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You are welcome to take this journey in solitude in your own personal journal or share your reflections. If anything that you do makes you think you might want to continue a journey using Spiritual Direction, now or in the future, you can make an appointment with me through my website: 

www.RedRocksSDC.com