MALAISE

I’ve been in a malaise. I said that to Sammy and she said it sounded like a French sauce, which, to be fair, it does - rather than what I actually meant: a sickly quietude, an aimless sort of depression. That to me is a ‘malaise’ - a shoulder shrug of qu’est-que-c’est seeping in like stagnant water. She wasn’t trying to be flippant. We talked about it.

Brené Brown, the noted American social science expert, says it’s what happens when creativity has no outlet. It blocks up the pores, bubbles inside, creates tension, perhaps even leaking out in tears every now and again. It’s an interesting theory: I haven’t been particularly creative recently, and there has been a lot in my mind. I’ve also been dreaming about the past, which, I have to tell you, is probably the very worst kind of time travel. Tears flow easily from the past - it does not help with the malaise.

So this morning, I got up and went for a walk.

No coat. That was just on the edge of sensible, I realised, as the chilly morning wind whipped around me. It was sunny though. Clear sunlight fell on fresh trees, leaves, and soil, and it picked out the white blossom swaying gently against the sky.

I sat on a log. Birds wheeled, planes glinted over the green hills of Hampshire. Through the trees the silver motorway span its ribbon, and the low sun painted the golden tops of houses, distant factories and buildings, as the world slowly got moving for the day.

There is… there is more going on than I can write about. It confuses things for me, makes problems harder to solve, people harder to talk to. I have my moments - but they’re so fleeting aren’t they? A half an hour? It’s barely enough time to discuss the weather! An hour? Luxury to some, not enough for deep enough, it turns out. I need a week. And who’s got a week to talk to me? Come to think of it, who’s got a week to spend talking? I don’t. And neither does my wife. Her brain leaps like a gazelle sometimes; it’s difficult to keep up.

So perhaps then, my creativity plus my circumstances have made this malaise unavoidable? Or perhaps I’m focusing on the wrong thing, and I should be working on ways to live with it rather than lament against it.

Moments like this morning make me wonder that. I need to get back to poetry, to song writing, to art, somehow. But how? Perhaps even to just being by myself in the woods, under the blue sky, listening to the uncluttered melody of the robin and the song thrush.