Dead Zones - Do you have them?

[Jim Palmer]

We've all heard of cell phone "dead zones." Sometimes I enter a personal dead zone. Here's how it works...

I'm going about my day, doing the next thing, perhaps even walking in the present reality of God's kingdom and mindful of the fullness of life and spiritual abundance within me...and then suddenly the "dead zone"...a surge of despair and emptiness and aloneness and despondency sweeps over me.

Sometimes it's a weariness like the feeling that I'm pretty much done with life and living and ready to move on to something different. Sometimes it feels like I'm observing the world in motion and every shred of it seems like total insanity. Sometimes it feels like I just want to unplug from it all, get off the merry-go-round and fade into the woodwork never to be heard from again - like move to New Zealand and become a sheep herder or something. That's a few of my dead zones anyway.

I kinda felt like maybe I should add all this other stuff to prevent you from thinking I'm going off the deep end or give this long God-explanation of the spiritual answer for dead zones and how I pull out of them and the better for it...blah...blah...blah...yadi...yadi...yadi...

But then I realized all I was wondering is, if anyone else experiences this and has their own dead zone moments.

[Kristin Tennant]

That's a great analogy for that feeling, Denie. Maybe we can think of ourselves in a slightly larger aquarium, still acknowledging that feeling, but less alone, with other nobody fish to ride it out with.

Denie Tackett said:

Well, at least I don't feel like I am going off the deep end now.....needed that blog, I don't feel so alone now. I call it being in a fish bowl. Seeing all that is going on around you, but never seeming to be a part of it. Swimming around and around but never getting anywhere and desperately waiting to get out of the bowl and get on to the next journey. Thanks for sharing!

[Kristin Tennant]

I definitely experience these "dead zones," in two different, extreme ways that tend to play off each other.

The first is that empty, disconnected feeling, that reminds me of how I felt when I was struggling with depression and going through a divorce about six years ago. Because the feeling brings that time in my life rushing back, I really dread it, and have to talk/pray myself out of making it something larger than it is.

One of the ways I fight that dead feeling is by filling my life with all that is good—loving my kids and new husband, writing the stories I think God wants me to tell on my blog, being very involved in a church that is a true place of refuge and healing and grace. Unfortunately, that's where the other brand of "dead zone" is rooted—in a too busy, too full life.

It's funny, right before I read this discussion thread I posted a discussion related to my desperate need to just get away from it all—even church—this past weekend. My husband and I spent the weekend at a cottage, just soaking up the quiet, calm, rest and connectedness we so needed.