I am losing precious days.

I am losing precious days.
I am degenerating into a machine for making money.
I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men.
I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.

-John Muir

I’ve written before about nature prescriptions and the health benefits of getting outside in the sunshine, but not until recently have I felt like this was a pill I myself needed to swallow. I’m tired all the time, uninspired; my head feels fuzzy and clouded; I’m disconnected, dispassionate, wanting to write but not really and unable to find the words anyway.

Hell, I did a crossword puzzle last night for the first time in forever and I struggled to think of words that I knew I knew. It was frustrating, and eye opening.

I’m not stressed, exactly, and I’m not depressed— I’m in a limbo of overwhelm from a relentless (and generally relentlessly negative) news cycle, an endless stream of tasks on a to-do list that never gets any shorter, and a lack of white space to give my brain room to breathe.

I lack edges. I lack sparkle, exuberance, enthusiasm. I am probably not much fun to be around.

I just need to break away, to soak up the sun, to feel the ground beneath my feet. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” John Muir says; Thoreau reminds us that “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”

Not till we are lost,
in other words not till we have lost the world,
do we begin to find ourselves,
and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

-Henry David Thoreau

I’m not so far gone that I think I need to forge my own physical or even metaphorical cabin on Walden’s Pond, but I understand more fully now his reasons for doing so: to live deliberately, to not give myself over to resignation, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.”

I don’t have a nice, neat way to end this post, which sort of tears me up inside, but I suspect continually putting off hitting publish until I think of one means never hitting publish. So, here you go. I am having a hard time, but I am not resigned.

Speak to me, internet:

Have you ever felt this way? How did you break out of it?