I know when I’m feeling down because this little part of my brain starts questioning why I’m doing anything.  Why go out and visit friends when I don’t really feel like it?  Why do any exercise when I feel tired?  Why get all dressed up to go to work?  Why get up at all?  Why…

Once I recognise this symptom it’s often difficult to fight.  I have a somewhat philosophical nature and I like asking those big questions of “what is the right thing to do” and “where should we be going”.  It’s easy to get a kind of choice paralysis when asking these questions, and if one is definitely staring down the barrel of a big question – should I disagree with someone I love, should I say something against a person that everyone else agrees with, should I complain about someone else’s misplaced generosity – then it can be really difficult to feel like you can move on.  And that’s when you start questioning why you should get out of bed.

It took me a while to feel like I could just ignore some of those questions and move on.  But I finally realised that I couldn’t let everything stall just because I can’t answer a question for which, almost by definition, there is no ‘right’ answer.  By getting on with the things we do every day – eating, doing the chores, getting out, exercising – we actually give our brains space to process some of those hard questions.  And in the process we almost invariably get some more input that adds valuable information.

By getting up and getting on with things, we are not stalling or putting off the question.  We are adding to our perception and improving our ability to choose.  Stalling is lying in bed doing nothing.  And sometimes things will solve themselves naturally without our intervention.  Most importantly, we keep to our comfortable routines, we keep on the move for new opportunities, and we don’t lose the energy and momentum to tackle life’s problems.

We sometimes need to walk around the problem and look at it from another angle, and we can only do that if we keep moving.