“I suppose the important thing is, if you’re tired, to understand what kind of tired you are. Are you physically tired? Emotionally tired? Spiritually tired? Because there are different ways to deal with each kind of tiredness. For physical tiredness, you need to rest and sleep. For emotional tiredness, sleep is important as well, but so are taking walks in the park, reading books, meeting with friends. For spiritual tiredness, which is a category of its own, the remedy (I think) is something like spending time with trees and looking at the sky. You need to somehow drink in the essence of existence.”  Theodora Goss in “Emotional Energy”

Theodora Goss is one of my favourite authors, so I find a lot to ponder when she steps away from her fantasy fiction and poetry and writes an essay or blog post.

Due to the stomach infection, I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m feeling emotionally tired. Part of that comes from the discomfort of the infection and part of it comes from dealing with doctors, labs, appointments, tests, and procedures. I find all this quite draining for it represents the kind of out-of-control chaos that I find pushing me into a world of fatigue.

While I like stirring things up in a trickster kind of way, I easily done-in when the stirring up is coming from somebody else–or the “system.” Maybe that’s karma. I can dish it out but I can’t take it. Oh hell, I don’t really believe in karma but there are times when one wonders.

I hear about people who run five miles before going to work. They feel better for running and love the kind of tired it brings. Getting up early enough to run and then take a shower before arriving at work on time makes me feel tired. That is, making it happen is a lot of tedious trouble.

People used to say, and maybe they still say it, “different strokes for different folks.” This makes it hard for husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, &c., who get tired for different reasons, often by the very things their spouse or BFF requires. We have to negotiate, I think, with those around us to give us all the freedom we need without draining other people’s energy. That kind of negotiation often makes us tired.

Right now, I’m too tired to figure this out. Needless to say, I would like to feel some positive energy, enough to run five miles even though I don’t want to.

–Malcolm