The Art of Embracing a Rut
Being stuck in a rut isn’t a sign of defeat but a necessary response.
A few months ago, I got stuck in a deep rut for several weeks. I don’t mean the type of muddy rut where you get jammed with your feet or tires. Rather, I’d been wrestling with its far more challenging cousin: The mental rut — also known as the slump or the funk.
Writing anything felt like walking over chewing gum. Getting out of bed like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen. Ideas were nebulous. Motivation scarce.
And yet, after spending all this time in my rut, I came to see it differently. I realized there’s an art to embracing a rut.
But before unpacking this idea, let’s turn to a fundamental question: Why does being in a rut feel so distressing? I think it’s because it has this bitter flavor of FOMO. There’s so much we want to achieve in life, but alas, here we are, jammed and downcast.
People who never got into one of these ruts will offer the ingenious solution to “just snap out of it.” But of course, it’s not that easy. When our mind is in a rut, we can’t pull our feet back out of the sludge, hop in the shower, and forget about the incident. No — mental ruts are sneaky. Treacherous. Sticky.
