Langishing

Most days I seek out a TED talk, stumbling across that of a Wharton professor who described me quite well as a person who has been languishing for much of the pandemic, if not before.  He noted his NY Times article in the talk, so I read that afterwards, this time not blocked for lack of a subscription.

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/well/mind/covid-mental-health-languishing.html

The pandemic has taken me through stages, depending on what I had to do or wanted to do.  For a while I probably met medical criteria for loneliness, though less so now.  I don't think I was ever despondent but often without purpose and hard to get motivated to leave My Space for more purposeful activity.  I did not feel sad or angry, even when I should have.  More numb or Stoic.

The talk and article, which the author had experienced, outlined remedies, some of which I had begun to figure out before understanding what had overcome me.  He advocated finding activities that had three features.

• MASTERY 
• MINDFULNESS 
• MATTERS

For him, that came from assembling family time to play a video game with relatives in other cities.  For me some of what has made me feel a little better has been my success at maintaining a treadmill schedule.  I now exercise at a level not possible when I made the commitment to do it.  I remain inner focused on a tune, with scheduled glances at a preset timer.  And I would like to feel more energetic, so the effort matters.

My self-expression has not gone as well, meeting mindfulness and matters, but not yet with the mastery.  In fact, it's still a project overdue in its formation.  I do very well responding to what others have conveyed, not nearly as well assembling and expressing my own thoughts or experiences.  It's also not yet Flow, that effortless feeling which keeps me focused on nothing else.  I still work with a timer, as I do with the treadmill, and have gotten better at not watching it, though not as well at letting it run to zero to define each session.  But it does capture the three M's.

He did not talk about giving up situations that promote languishing, for me the sanctuary of my synagogue on Saturday morning.  It currently and for a while has lacked all three M's, a place at which mastery is neglected, I'm not offered anything of importance to do or creativity to accomplish, and end results that do not seek to generate the excellence that really matters.  I do have a more challenging assignment for Pesach which may help.

Now that I have a better grasp of where my psyche has taken me and the better places it could be, I should be able to at least move in the direction of Flow, if not actually achieve it.

Feeling More Alive

Calamities can be opportunities.  Our odious President and our pandemic confinement have enabled a few beneficial things.  My Inner Compass seems a lot better defined.  And physically I feel more alive than I have in a few years.  Each has forced a level of previously frittered focus but in different ways.  I'm off a couple of my chronic medicines, not the antihypertensives and the lipid agents intended for longevity but the compulsivity suppressor, the nasal steroid, the anti inflammatories, and the alpha blockers designed either for my comfort or the comfort of those around me.   

I've done admirably well with personal scheduling.  There are designated sleep times and exercise times.  Grocery shopping has been more purposeful.  I have assigned days for finances and for car maintenance.  TED talks, which add to my sense of alive via admiration for what others achieved and convey, are accessed in a scheduled way with some design to what I will listen to.  Writing has not done quite as well, though blogging has settled into a morning activity with subjects added and saved as I think of them.  I keep up with reading the subscriptions that I pay for.  A new ritual of sherry or port in late afternoon has been added.  While concerned about both the expense and indulgence, I can afford both.  An attempt to replace with herb tea, which I also like and is more economical, did not generate the same late afternoon inner peace.  Household tasks have become better defined with more tangible end points.  Kitchen floor washed, bedroom floor vacuumed.

Looking at my aspirations from a few months ago, I've done well.  Making friends has lagged, that goes a lot better in person than on a screen.  I've been on my day trips, one more to go with destination affirmed.  Whether I will really get to a National Park seems less assured.  One project was best abandoned.  Better to do that purposefully than to have it linger undone if I am sure I won't do it.  And while the upcoming national election dominates the attention of others, I have made peace with making a statement and voting, which I can do effectively, and influencing outcome, which I cannot.  But it does clarify my Inner Compass.

Accessing TED Talks

When taking my courses at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute during the Fall of 2019, a couple of the courses were designed around presentation followed by discussion.  TED Talks, because of their diversity and expertise, provided much of the focus, though I didn't know what they were.  Some of the speakers were known to me by reputation, all were articulate and presumably experienced at solo speeches to large audiences.  While I took a liking to them and included myself in the followup discussions, the resource remained dormant.  My Spring 2020 classes had a different format, mostly too large for meaningful verbal exchange or too lecture focused.  As Covid-19 became dominant with connection to the world primarily by screen, I again sought out some type of entry to the idea marketplace.  Zoom seminars became a destination.  And OLLI classes have resumed online in Zoom format.  But I missed the TED Talks, those presentations designed to stimulate thinking more than present factual material.  Many were experience based, experiences that we do not have ourselves but can still share.

I started exploring what has been assembled.  It's massive.  When subdivided by topic, most subjects do not stimulate me but they stimulate others.  The program allows me to select my own interests and sifts through lectures their algorithms think I might enjoy, though my own style has been more surfing and sampling, not entirely randomly but with enough curiosity to tap subjects that were really on my B-List, perhaps unfairly.  Nearly all are less than a half-hour, well within my restricted attention span.  A new addition to my daily task list.