functional slumps are fueled by ambition

restlessness explained

“You’ll be fine.”

I smile the same smile that I always do. Polite. Automatic. Inwardly, I cringe at the tightness in my lips. But how else could I respond to the unsolicited reassurance? Of course I would be fine. I already knew that. So what exactly was the problem?

That’s just the thing. It was incredibly hard to describe the situation. Mostly because nothing was really wrong per se. Things just weren’t quite… right. And therein lay my issue. I was stuck somewhere on the spectrum between discouragement and frustration, with an indefinable root cause, that looked to the outside world like an imagined problem — a functional slump.

Lasting days, weeks, months, or even years, it comes in the form of sporadic restlessness, or an inexplicable lack of energy, or both. The subtle sense of urgency, anxiety, the feeling that something is missing. It doesn’t always affect productivity, but it brews dissatisfaction as time goes by and the imagined window of opportunity seemingly narrows with each day.

“Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it.”