Art by Corita Kent, Article by Austin Kleon
As this article notes, you have likely heard the new buzzword to describe our collective malaise these days, “languishing,” thanks to this recent NYTimes article, ps://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/well/mind/covid-mental-health-languishing.html. However, this far less widely circulated article https://austinkleon.com/2021/04/26/im-not-languishing-im-dormant/ by Austin Kleon, really spoke to me in a way the NYTimes article failed to do, despite the mass appeal and desperation for common language that catapulted it to quick popularity. What the NYTimes article failed to explain was to note that languishing is a term for the resulting fatigue that comes with “trying to flourish in terrible conditions,” as Kleon beautifully puts it. While that article did offer some solutions to help ease the languishing feeling, it should be noted that one was just uninterrupted time without trying to do much specifically. Sounds like being dormant to me!
Kleon goes on to use various gardening and nature metaphors to illustrate how there is a time and a season for all things and that constant productivity and constant flourishing is not something nature does, that attempt is uniquely human (and mightily flawed). Throughout the pandemic, I have reminded clients often that this is a time to survive, not a time to thrive and I have noted a mix of relief at that as well as interesting resistance. In a society so fixated on productive value, we have struggled collectively to take this as a time to slow down or outright collapse as the need has been. Now, as folks are getting their first and second vaccines and the summer season is arriving, there is again some mixed emotion. I hear excitement to regain some normalcy and hesitation to let go of the quiet that has come with this time and gained appreciation. Turns out we have learned to appreciate our dormant state in surprising ways when we push back on the pressures of productivity.
Can we continue to maintain this mentality that there are seasons of life that are meant for quiet, for retreat, for our own personal winters? Can we give ourselves permission to challenge the idea that constant flourishing is the norm? If Isaac Newton and Michaelangelo had to accept personal winters and still left such legacies (as the article explains), might that be good enough for the rest of us too?