Depression and the migratory urge

I don't know about you but I have been pretty depressed here lately. My business has dried up and blown away to heaven only knows where. My baseball teams never made it past the first part of post season and now the mid-term elections are over. I suppose that I am just bored with life with nothing much to focus on. My candidates won for the most part in the elections. I really sort of liked seeing San Francisco win the series. Buster Posey played baseball right here in Tallahassee at FSU and I have always followed Cody Ross from his days with the Marlins.

I think there is something more here that I am dealing with and it has been a theory of mine for several years. I have a very happy life. My wife who was very ill earlier this year has rallied back and is her old self. I have wonderful children and I have 5 grandchildren who live within 30 minutes of me. Soon I will have two more of those. I have a wonderful home in a NE subdivision of Florida's capital city. So far I have been able to keep the wolf away from the front door. My football team is defending national champs and running at #6 in the BCS. I play golf once or twice a week with good friends. My scores suck rocks but that has not changed recently. So just what is it that is bugging me?

Here is the point of this post. I don't know if you experience this or not. I find in my own life that when the weather changes and fall settles in around us, I get a sense of melancholy and nostalgia for no apparent reason. I sort of review my past and drag up all the hurtful things that have occurred in my personal history and I feel regret and sometimes just abject depression. I suppose I could get my doc to Rx the latest SSRI and get to feeling better but I find that it always seems to go away eventually. But what the heck is it?

What occurs in nature when the seasons change? The bears load up on carbs and hibernate. The Canadian geese, except for the ones who defecate all over the greens on my golf course year round, fly south. Heck, even the monarch butterflies come floating in over the Gulf of Mexico in the hundreds of thousands. You see thier little corpses all over Hwy 98 south as some of them make landfall with unfortunate synchronicity of the passing of a car. Man, what is up with all that?

I believe that there is a remnant of the migratory urge in all of us. It is settled way down in our DNA. Back when we lived in caves and or tents or on the side of a cliff in a dugout apartment the weather would change. This signaled to us that we better follow the herds, head to a warmer climate or hunker down for the winter. I visited a place once upon a time named Montezuma's castle. It is about 50-60 miles north of Phoenix. There in the side of a sheer cliff are the remnants of the homes of a race of people who just up and disappeared back in around 1100 AD. No one knows where they went or why.

I think we mistake depression often for this wanderlust that seems to be endemic inside all of us. Now don't get me wrong there is a lot of stuff to be depressed about. Our economy is in deep guacamole. I don't see it turning anytime soon. However, who am I to judge. There are people that we just elected to office that are much smarter and more clever than you and I that are going to save us all. What's that? They are no more clever than any of the rest of us? Gulp !! Guess I will start taking a look at property in Niceragua.