Winter's Discontent
I am decidedly solar-powered. Too many consecutive cloudy days and my brain goes into involuntary hibernation. I have a “sun replacement” list of things that I can do to mitigate that, but ultimately, the sun cannot be replaced. As soon as it peeks out from behind the heavy grey cloud cover, it’s like the line of ideas and positive emotions that were waiting behind a closed door can finally come in.
Thus, February’s inspiration happened in fits and starts. Days spent in a sort of holding pattern, and brief bright afternoons of crafting, creating, organizing, and refreshing systems. Accepting that, instead of demanding a consistent workflow from myself, helped me see that it averaged out in the end.
Between one household plague ending and almost immediately being followed by another, we spent a lot of time at home. I did get out for one attempted adventure (a reward to myself for a specific vision test that I irrationally dislike), although it didn’t go as planned. I went to the National Portrait Gallery, because I haven’t been there yet and also because they currently have an orchid display that looked bright and pretty in the pictures. But when I arrived, the line to get in was inexplicably wrapped around the building. While I sat down on a nearby bench to check their website for some sort of event happening that day that I was unaware of (there wasn’t one), the line not only didn’t progress it also got twenty feet longer and turned a second corner of the building’s perimeter. I considered that even if I did wait in the line and eventually get in, I’d be in there with all those people, and crowded venues are not my favorite.
So I set off down the street toward other Smithsonian attractions, but halfway there I stumbled upon the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum. I had a book about Clara Barton when I was a kid that I enjoyed reading, and there was absolutely no one in there, so I wandered around a fascinating albeit period-accurately lit (read: dark) preserved boarding house and learned some things I didn’t know.
I’m doing my best to accept the limits of both the season and my own capacity, to outprocess the meh parts so they don’t pile up and block my mental windows when the sun finally does come out. Resisting the capitalist conditioning for robotic consistency in output is surprisingly difficult, given how soul-sucking living like that is, but I’m practicing. And hoping that the positive experiences I’ve had will help the practice stick.
But I’m also checking the budding daffodils twice a day for blooms.