“I’m okay, I’m just in a funk right now.”
Recently a friend and I had a discussion about getting into a “funk.” We agreed that what puts one person into a funk may be far different from another. And, we contemplated how time and life experience can help, as the things we used to fret over when we were younger seem inconsequential to us now. So, what’s your funk-worthy factor?
The funk-worthy factor has nothing to do with George Clinton.
Well, maybe one kind of funk-worthy is how much you can get down. But here, we’re saying it means what’s the scale of “stuff” that it takes to put you into a funk? And I realize there are different degrees of funk. There’s being stressed out with too much on your to-do list. There’s worrying about XYZ (fill in your own “stuff”) over which you have no real control. Moving further up the ladder into worse territory, there are more serious and life-changing problems/episodes. I am not sure I would include those into the “funk” category — I think those issues have moved past funk and into full-on grief/strife/depression.
But back to the funk-worthy factor: has yours always been the same?
Do you feel like the lessons you’ve learned or the stages you’ve gone through have made you not sweat the small stuff? Or do you think it’s more of a personality characteristic? Perhaps even in childhood you were the kind of kid who was unfazed by stressors or petty dramas. Or maybe the opposite is true and you’ve had to learn to mellow yourself a bit.
As for me, I wish I could go back in time and talk to my younger self. “SAVE YOUR ENERGY!” I would say. That meeting we went to for our preschool children, making sure we understood the exact type of Tupperware container necessary for their lunches? And the list of forbidden foods, and figuring out what to pack for a picky 3-year-old, when you have limited options that fit in this slender container? Gosh, I’d say. So the kid skips lunch, so what? Feed him spaghetti-os when you get home. I’d maybe get more serious and pull myself aside and say, “I hate to break it to you, but you are going to have rougher waters to tread than pre-school lunch. We’re talking big waves coming.”
But maybe that’s the gift that time and age give you.
As 50 looms on the horizon (still over a year away, but looming), I have come to appreciate with each decade a shedding of skin. We let go of commitments, relationships, activities or habits that are not nourishing us. We seek the people and things that build us up, and we shake off the rest little by little.
As you evaluate yourself and your own funk-worthy factor, has it changed throughout your life? Is it an up and down zig-zag pattern, rising and falling with the courses of circumstance? Or has your wisdom/age/experience crystalized a different lens through which you filter your “life-junk”? Look back on some of your past experiences and struggles, worries or problems. I bet you can pat yourself on the back and think, “hey, I wouldn’t let XYZ bother me today like it did back then.” And if we can recognize our personal growth , how we’ve matured from then to now, that gives us the fortitude to apply it to our current situations. If we can take a step back (easier said than done) when we feel the clouds of stress/funk coming on, we could take a litmus test.
We could ask ourselves: “Is this funk-worthy?”
And if we respond “no, I guess not really,” then we can surprise ourselves by being able to shake it off. Instead, it seems we too often allow “stuff” to interrupt our peace-joy mojo. We recognize that we permit this invasion of our peace, and we try to mitigate it as we complain to others: “Listen, I know these are champagne problems, but…” By putting in the qualifier, we’re trying to justify complaining. We justify our “sweating the small stuff” by acknowledging the relative insignificance of the problem in the scheme of life crises and global issues.
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” — Marcus Aurelius
Stoic philosophy offers another way to think about getting out of a funk. Or more accurately, it teaches us how we can prevent people or circumstances from sending us into one. The Stoic mindset allows you to reframe. A circumstance isn’t bad or good, it’s our assessment of it that makes it so. Putting some Stoicism into our “stuff” might be the answer for not allowing certain thoughts to encroach that would bring the gray clouds of funk rolling in. For more nuggets of stoic wisdom, check out the Daily Stoic blog, a daily dose of stoic writings and applications.
Of course, if you do find yourself in the proverbial funk, maybe George Clinton is the answer after all. Fight funk with funk.