Fighting the Blahs

I've often said that the time spanning from about the Super Bowl until the clocks spring ahead is my least favorite season in New England. Winter is getting old, spring seems light years away...everything just becomes stale. In the past, particularly in our pre-kid days, I'd distract myself by dreaming and planning elaborate summertime trips. That's not really in the cards these days, at least not for awhile. The kids are so young and Ethan has his additional challenges. We're trying to save money and contemplating career/business changes. The timing isn't right.

Oh, how I loved those trips. For someone who normally hates change, I've never quite understood my passion to see different places. I actually get excited if I'm on a stretch of road in Connecticut I've never driven on. It doesn't take much to thrill me. One year (1996, I think) during my winter doldrums, and being broke, Dan and I took off to Albany for the day. Albany! And had a blast. Another wintery Saturday I drove to Montpelier just because it was the only state capital in New England I'd never seen. I get antsy. I get jittery. I get bored with driving the same stretch of 91 day in and day out, and the unending trips to Target and Big Y for forgotten household items. Sometimes it just feels like drugery. I hate to say it, but sometimes Ethan's appointments feel that way, too. Of course I'm so grateful to have them. So grateful. But other days I can't help but think, "I have to do this five days a week for another 10 months?" And then there's this little part of me that voices protest, like a toddler, "But I don't WANT to!"

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I know that part of my struggle with the blah's is simple human nature, but I think this issue is magnified for those of us living in a Western "comfortable" culture. We have the luxury of being dissatisfied because some of our wants, not needs, are not being met. Do people in Haiti get "the blahs?" In Sudan or Ethiopia?

I was spending time with God yesterday while vacuuming (a phenomenon that happens quite often) and poured out some of my frustrations with life, and myself. I am realizing that I have not yet figured out what it means to live a joyful life. Instead, I've spent most of my years living from one "experience" to another to get me by. Meaning: I look forward to things to fuel me, like pizza for dinner or a movie that night...vacations, a shopping trip (to a bookstore; I hate clothes shopping!). None of that is bad in itself, but I want more. I want to stop living from thrill to thrill. There are people who even live from spiritual thrill to thrill, jumping from one conference to another, looking forward to tingly encounters with God. Again, it's not necessarily bad to thirst for an experience or an encounter. But I want to learn how to live when those things are stripped away. I think it's why people fast (something I've never done very well with). The question is: if I don't have my Dunkin' Donuts coffee, my Facebook, my TV show, my chocolates....do I still feel fulfilled? And how many spaces meant for God inside me am I filling with other things?

I've heard Joyce Meyer define joy as a "calm delight." Right now that sounds okay, really, but nothing special. I want to learn how to embrace a life of calm delight, because right now, if I'm not feeling really happy, because of my vacation plans or my lucrative freelance project or whatever it is, then sometimes I fight the blahs. I think sometimes we (or I, at least) become addicted to how things make us feel. And if we aren't feeling really great, then we need to find something to make us feel really great.

Yet there are times of just being, resting, waiting on God. The quiet in-between seasons...like the gray, dreary days before spring when not much beauty or life is evident. Someone said recently, "God didn't say 'Be still and feel that I am God.'" Be still and KNOW. Knowing something is true rather than feeling it is not nearly as exciting. I'm longing to be satisfied by just knowing sometimes. Knowing that this season will pass. Knowing that good things lie ahead. Knowing that God is good and that I am blessed. Knowing that, as Paul stated, "Whatever state I am in, I can be content."