One of my favourite words and one which scares me most is this – languishing. The first time I heard it was in a NYTimes article. While this feeling became a phenomenon during the pandemic, I believe it is more common than we know.
Now, look at my own example. I haven’t written any new blogpost for past 8 days or so, neither did I log in. At first, it was “I will write soon”, then it was “I know I should write but I am just not coming across any good topic”, and then it was “if I log in and do not write, I will feel guilty”, to then “ahhh hmmm okay fine…” etc. I had to physically get myself to log in to this website and get to write. But if not for this extreme push, I would have just let a few more days past without writing anything. This is how we live our lives too. We languish most of the time.
We languish. We languish till life wakes us up through some jolt. But till then we languish. It is as if we sleepwalk through life with an assumption that tomorrow will be different, but forgetting that the today that we are living is infact the tomorrow of yesterday. So, without any change, we just continue to live and languish.
The perfect companion for anyone languishing is the continuous scroll of social media. In both, languishing and scrolling non-stop, we fool ourselves in believing that the next day (or reel) is better than the current one. We become zombies and go hopping from one day (or reel) to the next without any retrospection of how we have lived our days so far.
I guess in some ways this languishing is a blessing. Some of us have tough lives and unless they chose to languish it would be tough to wake up each day and face it. They need to zombie-up and live through their days because in all probability their tomorrow will be same as today.
We also start to label out languishing. “going on”, “busy with family”, “settled down”, etc are our labels to this languishing. There is nothing wrong with this. But I do believe that we all need to, once in a while, stop and do some reflecting on what is that we are busy with and whether we have any intentionality in how we conduct our lives.
While I do not want to end this post here, I have had this problem for some time now. While I do get some good ideas on topics to write about and I struggle to conclude these topics properly. For now I am going to end this post but I hope to come back to this post and write a proper conclusion. This by the way is also a kind of languishing.
Additional read: How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
On life and time 