There are times you know aren’t going to be any fun; you just have to get through them. Maybe there’s a deadline ahead you know is going to take all your resources to meet. Maybe there’s a grief that needs moving through. Or some kind of addiction you’ve decided to tackle. Or perhaps the world just doesn’t seem to be cooperating with your happiness, and you can’t figure out what you’re doing to cause it or whether it has anything to do with your actions and decisions at all, but you figure it has to change eventually.

The phrase I use with myself is put my head down. “I just have to put my head down,” I think, “and get to the other side of this.” It implies a lowering of expectations—don’t count on joy or even much pleasure—but also implies that it’s okay to let some things slide. One doesn’t worry about vacuuming the carpet when there’s two inches of water in the house. It’s okay not to exercise when you’re down with the flu.

At the very latest, I put my head down in late September, and while I haven’t quite picked it back up, through my peripheral vision I think I might see a turn up ahead. This is way too long to experience the world this way. And I suspect I’m underestimating when it started. There was a noticeable turn back some time around Memorial Day when I realized that the Covid-related sprint I thought I was running was really a marathon, and that, though I was already running it, and would continue to, the race couldn’t start until most of the people in the country were convinced they had to do it as well. 

For me, this was a bad combination of pandemic, politics, and a lot of work all hitting at the same time. And I know how relatively easy I had it. Still, I’m exhausted. When life gets like this, when it’s all about getting through it, I have a very hard time not projecting forward to the end and imaginatively looking back. This isn’t always a bad quality—sometimes it helps to ask “what’s the point?”—but it can be another pressure. The pressure, I suspect, that telling myself it’s time to put my head down is meant to relieve. But when it goes on this long, it’s gone on too long.

So I’m hoping that in this bleak late fall photo, I’m most of the way down this dirt path, ready to see what’s around the turn. That January tends to be a good month for me offers some cause for optimism. That I’ll have a lot less work to do offers some as well. 

We’re five or six days from the point at which the days start to get longer. Hold on. Enjoy the holidays if you’re able. Put your head down if you have to. Get to the other side of this however you can.