This too shall pass
I’ve been in a bit of a creative slump recently. While that was certainly influenced by being sick as a dog for a couple weeks, it’s mostly just been a muddy slog in creativity-land.
I tried the usual things – get outside in the fresh air and move around, read a book, listen to some new podcast episodes, call a friend, get immersed in small projects that allow my mind to wander…but nothing really shifted.
We all know there are peaks and valleys to things. Times when things are up and times when things are down. There’s a saying I think of in those valley times that offers some comfort: This too shall pass.
Of course, it did pass and this week I got a hit of creative energy that I have been riding happily since.
As I sat with all this transpiring, I started to reconsider the comfort of that saying. It is most often used as reassurance in hard times…but we don’t really consider that it is actually a universal comment. Bad times don’t last forever…and neither do good times.
Usually, when things are hard and I think – this too shall pass – and when it finally does, I then think, OK great, now everything is back to normal.
But that’s not normal. In fact, there is no “normal”. There is just a constant journey forward, up and down like a sine curve, moving between the peaks and valleys. Normal is, in fact, the very act of traveling along that curve, moving from state to state and all the moments in between. And thinking that being in the “good” zone as being “normal” sets us up for a lot of disappointment in off times.
Maybe the move here is to alter the phrase slightly to This all will pass and stay current in each moment before things move on to the next…
