Burnout
is a word that conjures a hollowed out, blackened centre
Burnout is a discarded friendship with what could be described as our inner dream body: the very physical place where our enthusiasms and willingness to travel far horizons were generated.
Burnout
is a word that conjures a hollowed out, blackened centre, now lying, due to our exhaustion, not only at the very core of our body but of our way of being. Burnout feels like a living central absence, not only of a centre, but the sources that used to rise from that centre.
The exhaustion of burnout always recalls a previously felt internal fire, one from which our unquenchable energies once emerged. Burnout denotes a kind of amnesia: not only in the forgetting of our very personal priorities but the inability to locate a source inside us that previously seemed to run through all the seasons of our life. This loss of a fiery essential centre is also experienced as a loss of faith: a form of forgetting, not only that the source actually existed inside me in the first place but that I might not now ever remember how to drink from it again.
Burnout is diagnosed by exhaustion, often caused by calling on energies in work or family life, that are not native to my way of being: the necessity of having had to use my will to keep going hour after hour, day after day; of assuming goals that actually belong to other people and which I have stolen to my detriment.
Burnout always involves a loss of the timeless and therefore of the ability to rest. Burnout, in a very profound way, is a loss of friendship with time itself, a daily existence that can no longer honour the specific gifts and seasonality of the hours that guide me through the day. Exhausted, I no longer appreciate an early misted morning, a long slow afternoon or the preparations for an evening gathering. Everything is in the way of everything else, and everything is a barrier to my becoming; irritation becomes my constant companion. Burnout is the experience of feeling continually out of season: spring might as well be summer and summer might as well be autumn and could just as well be winter, everything becomes something to get through, but where everything also seems to be going straight through me, without touching the sides.
In the loss of faith in existence itself, we refuse, in a kind of symmetrical sympathy, to fully exist ourselves. Being out of season with the outside world means we also miss our own inner, creative, tidal comings and goings. Burnout’s ultimate tragedy is that we cannot even recognise who or even what we are missing in our life: we stop recognising what possibilities are coming and going, who has entered and who has actually left. Burnout prevents me from loving, burnout is our inability and then our refusal to love the harvests and riches of time.
