Sharing Saturday
It happens every year around this time – in the dark, dreary, middle of the winter – I start to feel as gray as the cloudy sky above me. Despite the fact that my birthday breaks up the month of February, and Valentine's Day adds a fun, pink respite from the gloom, I find myself sinking into a fallow state.
In the old days, before email held us hostage day and night at our computers, before we had the novelty of social media to keep us feeling like we were doing something, if only responding to stimuli from others – such a fallow period could be almost romantic in its languor and lack of productivity.
But today, I can sit at my computer all day and look productive, accomplishing absolutely nothing, while checking my various work and home email accounts, Facebook and Twitter feeds and feeling like at least I'm not lying in bed in my pajamas, fully succumbing to the torpor. But I have no energy. Nothing seems urgent enough for my attention. I can't find it in me to pay the bills, do the laundry, finish a project for a client. At least not today.
I sit at my dining room window, which floods with light in the warmer months, and peer at my backyard. The scene reveals nothing but dead grass and icy patches, remnants from the irritating snow storm that only dumped four inches on our region but completely shut us down for a night, coming as it did at the height of a rush hour and creating untold numbers of commuter horror stories for years to come.
The yard is as fallow as I feel today. No foreseeable buds, not a hint of green. The ping pong table is still taped up in the box in which it was delivered, arriving precisely one day before the temperature plunged in early November, never to regain equilibrium through this, one of the longest DC winters I've ever experienced.
There was some sunshine this morning when I drove my youngest to school – and for a brief moment, I considered taking a walk. I could feel the pull of its rays – it was Pavlovian. But the clouds quickly rolled in and the day became raw and dark again – another in an unending series of days to evoke depression and longing.
I know that spring will eventually inch its way back. I will blast "Here Comes the Sun" in my car, heralding the warmth and the opening possibilities that come with the new season. I know that we will once again throw open our windows and greet our neighbors on the street, and we will all marvel at how tall the kids have grown since we saw them last fall, swinging on the swings in the little patch of park that marks the middle of our block.
I know that I will once again feel productive and happy. Perhaps I will finish my book proposal. Perhaps I will work with a new client.
But for now, I am lying fallow. Maybe there is some earthly analogy in this state, lying dormant for a day or two while I regenerate inside. Much like the trees, like the plants, even like the mosquitoes waiting to emerge from the dank ground. Maybe we humans, too, are supposed to have these quiescent periods.
Maybe we all need some fallow time to consider our place in the world, to remember who we were and who we want to be. The external trappings of civilization and productive work can do much to mask our true intentions most of the time.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately" says Thoreau at Walden Pond. Deliberate living. Unplugging. Lying fallow for a day to heed a body's call to be quiet. These are February's whispers in the midst of this long, cold, lonely winter.
Photo by Klearchos Kapoutsis via Flickr
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