Feeling a little off-kilter

While I didn't particularly stop and ponder long here,
on Thursday—knowing that my To Do list was a little
lighter than usual—I took a detour of a couple of hours
to visit this old garden in the middle of Tokyo.

Today I'm feeling the usual Monday blues: not keen to get started on work. But it's bigger than that. 

When I feel out of sorts, I try to think things through a little to figure out if there is a good reason (and often there is, though I know that people who struggle with mental illness don't necessarily have that privilege). So I'm writing here today, thinking about this.

I've discovered a few things that are contributing to this current season of feeling a bit low and unmotivated:

• These last 20 months have been quite frantic in many ways: 
• our eldest son moved to Australia, 
• we've done two international moves (which of course involved changing houses and schools and churches and pretty much everything else), 
• the craziness as we tried to achieve our goals for home assignment in just six months, 
• plus some personal crises in our family that I haven't been able to share publically.
• My work schedule is such that June to September is a bit crazier than usual, due to an effort to keep our magazine production away from the busy month of December, plus extra family demands during the 10 or so weeks of school holidays. 

Both these "adrenaline-inducing" periods are over and it's the "come down" emotion I'm experiencing when things aren't quite so urgent.

It was drizzling, so not inviting to sit (wet
surfaces everywhere), but lovely for wandering.

• I've been doing this magazine editing for nine years now, that's the longest I've worked in any job, so I wonder if it's just an itchy-feet thing? I'm not really looking for something different to do, but still, emotions don't necessarily follow logic (interestingly I wrote about a similar restless feeling about this job in Feb 2013!)
• My social media job I've now been doing for two years and it is by no means dull (neither is the magazine), but it is relentless and that can get tiring.
• And then there was the news we received on Thursday that David will spend 10 days in hospital in November to get a skin graft to replace the skin he lost to surgery in September. Thankfully no cancer was found in all that was taken, but it is a long stay in hospital that will mean, along with two work trips earlier in the month, he will be away about 50% of November. I don't cope well with him being away and I'm sure the anticipation of that is affecting me.

Then yesterday we had almost a whole day without any children at home. They both left before 8am to go to an international cross country competition on the other side of the city and stayed overnight there. It was delightful, but also just plain weird, to have the day to ourselves. We had a great day. But it's going to take some adjusting to move from the busyness of intense parenting over the last couple of decades to couplehood living again. Thankfully the change will not happen overnight!

So, I've probably got good reasons to feel a little off-kilter.

I was challenged and encouraged yesterday during church by this passage:

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal (2 Cor. 4:16-18 ESV).

I've taken a bit of a look back this morning at some of the blog posts I've written in the last few years about the challenges of slowing down and not being totally consumed with the need to be needed or frantically busy. I found this one from March two years ago, it includes a quote from our Field Director, who passed away about six weeks after he wrote this. It talks about the importance of slowing down:

Many of us these days seem to live life simply moving from one thing to the next with little time in between to catch our breath, far less having time to reflect, meditate or even spend some unrushed time with God. And that can creep into family life, church life, corporate life, organisational life. . . But while we might desire to be ‘about the Lord’s work’ to use an older phrase, that does not seem to me to mean that we should simply be dashing around in a constant blur of activity.

Busyness can certainly help us avoid unpleasant emotions and rescue us from having to think too hard. But I don't think that's how God intends us to live. Live life with a passion and not slothfully, for sure, but not so busily that we can't keep our eyes fixed on him and lose any ability to hear what he's calling us to do. All that being said, I need to get better at living it.

But as for now: I need to get back to the less urgent (and potentially less exciting) bits and pieces of my job.