I am tired. I’ve said this for the last hundred odd years. It’s a funny fatigue – the kind of fatigue that makes you want to plonk into bed and stare at the small screen that screeches for attention each time you walk by. It is the kind of fatigue that creeps insidiously down your neck into your arms and your legs finally curls up under your feet.
And then I realise it isn’t a physical thing. It is a mental thing – an emotional thing. It is the residue that is left behind, once the fluid part has been squeezed out. You get the drift ? It is a feeling of barrenness and I have begun to understand why. It is the monotony that has crept into a schedule that is packed with deadlines, obligations and demands that hang over us like the sword of Damocles. You don’t do them and you are dead.
The fact is we do not die if we do not do them. But we do die, if we are always running from pillar to post doing stuff that we always do not need to do but still do – prompted perhaps by the fear of letting someone down or losing some brownie points or more importantly falling in our own esteem for having been anything less than perfect.
We feel fatigued because we are not doing things creatively. We are doing stuff in the tried and tested way. We feel fatigued because we aren’t doing things to feed our souls. We feel fatigued because we are living life according to parameters set by others. We are fatigued simply because we aren’t living.
And guess what ? If we choose to, we can start living – by doing things creatively, by not being harsh on ourselves, by taking out time to do the stuff that we love doing. We aren’t indispensable – the ones who we think will crumble without our added presence in their life, will do just fine even if we are not hovering over them like mother hens.
So each time fatigue takes over – we just need to breathe in and tell ourselves that there is a lot more to life than the here and now. What matters at the end is how happy we are and how much we have contributed to the happiness of others without letting ourselves down.
Image : recep-bg ( Unsplash )
