What’s Our Deal?
The Doldrums.
I think I’ve figured it out. This general malaise, this awful feeling of formlessness.
I remember learning the meaning of “the doldrums” in elementary school during our unit about the Spanish Explorers. Everybody would be out in the boats, sailing along, drinking their grog, then mysteriously, almost as if a curse had dropped upon them, the winds would vanish. They would sit on the water, dead air, baking in the fearsome sun, burning through supplies without any forward progress, waiting, praying for the trade winds to resume, carrying them forward for exploring, debauchery, and dubious destinies in foreign lands.
Those days and weeks without wind were the doldrums, an area specific to the plus or minus of the equator, where the winds of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres would peter out and not quite meet. In that delta was only a swath of sea where sailors lost the propulsion of the wind entirely, no alternative but to wait for the currents to bring them back to the winds on the other side of the equator.
I used to think of the term “doldrums” as boredom or maybe being down, like a transitory depression, probably because my dad used to say to me when I was pouty, “are you down in the doldrums?”. In reality it meant, “ostensibly the entire world has ground to a halt; that smell you pick up in the air is the warning of your imminent demise, and you’re irretrievably screwed if things don’t change.” The doldrums.
I think probably a lot of us are feeling “down in the doldrums”, but not quite like my dad implied. I think this quarantine feels like it’s both dragging on endlessly and yet time is still racing, wasting. We are at once both static and losing traction, sliding away into the ether.
“We’ve zoomed through happy hours, I’ve distanced in the park with friends . . . everything should be fine enough. And yet, it’s not.”
And it makes me wonder why? I’m no stranger to working from home. For all of my recorded history, my parents worked from home. I could walk from my bedroom, down the hall, make a left, walk through a tv room, and enter the “office”, a converted garage, to hear the clacking of my mom’s typewriter or “word processor”, my dad would be on the phone, the wall unit air conditioner generating a pleasing white noise and welcome chill. It was comforting.
About 10 years ago, we shut down the office for our family business and all began working remotely. I was fine with that too. It felt like a return to what I had always known; my wife and I always on standby for our kids, able to pop down to the kitchen for a quick bite of leftovers. That too was comforting. That didn’t feel like this.
I’ve considered the whole stress aspect, that that might be what’s informed my out-of-sorts-ness, but I don’t really feel stressed. We are extremely privileged in that none of our friends or family have contracted the virus. We’ve been ok enough with respect to supplies and resources; while we’ve not been able to forgo all rash tempers, the household has generally been very harmonious. The kids have been understanding and patient. The neighborhood has been bucolic with the sounds of kids playing in the street, old skool style. We’ve zoomed through happy hours, I’ve distanced in the park with friends . . . everything should be fine enough. And yet, it’s not.
In my last post, I talked about the communion of a forest; how the network of actively communicating root systems beneath our feet and the branches grazing each other above our heads form a sort of living group hug as we pass through. That image of connection to place, connection to life, keeps coming to my mind. And I think I’ve figured it out.
It’s human connection. Not just within our own lives, the connection we have with people in our workplace, with our friends and family, with people in the grocery store, but other people’s connections to other people and their connections to other people still. It’s not just that we’re missing being connected to our own immediate network, I think we’re feeling the overall loss of connection in the world.
I think, much like trees, all connecting through an intense network that makes the sum greater than its parts, there is sort of a ripple effect created for humans. When people connect, there is an energy produced. And that energy lights up a certain distance, then the people within the outer reaches of that first circle create their own overlapping circle, and on and on until, like raindrops on a lake during a downpour, the entire surface is lit up with movement, with energy. I think that collective energy feeds us, that collective energy is holy.
Raised in a church, I well remember Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them.” Even though my faith looks a lot different now than it did then, I do think of this verse often. And in a deconstructionist way that would horrify my grandmother, I wonder if maybe we read that wrong? Right words, wrong meaning. What if, instead of a group of people magically summoning Jesus Christ, a gathering of people creates a sort of communion that in itself is sacred? There is you, there is me, and then there is the space between us that is intrinsically altered by the math of our presence. What if that “sum of energy” is itself divine?
If you’re a traditional person, buckle up for some woo . . . I’ve often thought that before we came here to this plain, to this existence, perhaps we were all one? Like a massive cloud of thought, the classic understanding of a collective consciousness, I suppose. What if we were all one, complex, complicated collective of experience and intentions, and we break off to come to this life? What if this whole life is really about finding our way back to that collective?
We spend decades doing things that really are at their core, about searching for belonging. Connection. And those with more contentment in their lives do indeed tend to experience life with a greater sense of connection. And I don’t mean quantity of friends, like some massive popularity contest, but actual connection, feeling seen and heard, feeling belonging, even if it’s just with a tiny handful of people. The better quality of that connection, the greater our contentment will be. And when I light up with connection, you light up with connection, you light your neighbor up with connection, and they light their neighbor with connection . . . on and on until it’s sort of an energetic version of the LA basin at night—an endless blanket of lights as far as the eye can see, turning the night into a sort of perpetual, glowing sunset.
“There is you, there is me, and then there is the space between us that is intrinsically altered by the math of our presence. What if that ‘sum of energy’ is itself divine? ”
But now, that sky is dark. Our connection to each other is broken. We may have the power of our individual household connections, like generators noisily humming away during a power outage, as the power fades and blinks with our individual bad days, with our frustration and boredom, and we all sally on, burning as brightly as we can for each other. But it’s just not the same as pulling our power from the grid. There’s a silence in the energy, similar to a silence in the air during a power outage. We don’t realize what sounds are missing, we just know that there was some indiscernible hum that has silenced. We’re all just, “off”. We are in this moment not a “sum that’s greater than”, we are just parts, remembering that something felt different not all that long ago.
What’s our deal? Why can’t we feel grounded? Why does this all feel so strange? Why is this so different than the working at home that I’ve always known? We’re in a massive power outage, the direct result of the loss of collective connection, and our world just feels dark. Still. A little bit desperate. Windless, stagnant air regardless of the weather report. We’ve lost propulsion and are left to just ride the slow current across the equator, waiting for the trade winds to find us on the other side.
The doldrums.
As awful as this is, how nice to be reminded just how important we are to each other. Just how much each of us are little points of light and heat that keep each other warm, or rather, grounded. Connected to the larger whole. Our problem is that we’re not just missing the lights, we’re missing the glow.
We’ll get through this, of course. And things WILL return to something that feels like normal. But I think now I know what I’m looking for—that collective hum that we feel more than hear—connection. We can only defy our nature so long, we will find each other again. We will regain propulsion soon. And until then, I’m just over here, shining bright, looking forward to the return of that perpetual, glowing sunset created by our light.
