Get back onto the horse
Sometimes, things are difficult, your skillset and personality just make your current challenges worse, or you’ll have an off week, and it might feel like nothing’s working and everything is terrible forever.
Every time this has happened to me so far, the feeling eventually passes, and then the most important thing that I can do is put one foot in front of the other again and get back onto that horse, even if I don’t feel like it, because sometimes action can lead to emotion. If you’re trying to get out of feeling this way, uninspired action leading to positive emotion is probably what you need most right now.
The world is more complicated than you think
The world is more complicated than you think, even if you already think the world is really complicated. The linked example doesn’t even begin to touch on the complexity created by things that are alive, let alone things that are conscious. I feel like this belief is something that’s easy to memorize and recite, but much harder to really know in your bones.
The animal is also you
You, the entity reading this by converting millions of stimuli with slightly different intensities into symbols or sounds and then extracting meaning from them, cohabit your body with an animal who is also you. That animal is a good girl/boy/pal who wants to be helpful and tries its best but can’t communicate with you in words the way that I am doing here. It wants plenty of rest and sun and good food and a stimulating environment. When it feels good, you feel good, because it’s you. And when it feels bad because maybe you’re like young me and don’t know the animal is trying to tell you it needs exercise and you get confused and angry when the animal is grumpy and destructive, you feel bad, because the animal is also you.
Be generous with appreciation
Being generous with appreciation feels great. It is a learned skill that you can dramatically improve with practice. A simple, genuine aside of “I appreciated that you X, thanks!” can make both you and the other person feel good, and makes it more likely they will do similar things in the future. Appreciation isn’t a limited resource, so it’s not helpful to try to save it up for when it really matters.
cologne
The scented oil cologne is a genericized trademark, named after the fragrance Eau de Cologne, first sold by Italian-German perfumier Giovanni Maria Farina in 1709. Farina’s perfume was citrusy and renowned for being consistently homogeneous. Its fame was such that it was referred to as aqua mirabilis (Latin for “miracle water”) among European nobility, and it cost six months of a clerk’s salary per bottle. When France conquered Cologne as part of the 1797 Treaty of Campo Formio, the free trade regime it imposed led to dozens of imitators selling knockoff Eau de Cologne springing up, prompting its genericization.
Farina named Eau de Cologne after his place of residence, the Free Imperial City of Cologne. Rather than a German name like Kölnisch Wasser (Köln is the name of the city in German), he gave it a French name because it was the lingua franca among European nobility at the time. The company he founded in 1709, Johann Maria Farina gegenüber dem Jülichs-Platz GmbH, still exists and manufactures cologne today.
The city of Cologne was founded around 50 CE as a Roman colony, named Colōnia Agrippina after the woman who supported its promotion from a military garrison, Nero’s mother Julia Agrippina. Ironically, in every language except Latin, over the millennia the “Agrippina” portion of the name was dropped, leaving just Colōnia/Cologne/Köln, Latin for “colony”.
The Latin word colōnia comes from colōnus, meaning colonist or farmer, which in turn comes from colō, meaning to cultivate or till. Colō has been reconstructed to descend from Proto-Indo-European kʷelh₁ some 6000 years ago, meaning to turn, revolve, or dwell. Other words that descend from kʷelh₁ include Greek τέλος (télos) and English wheel.