Do you find it sad when wisdom is whittled away to witticism? You shouldn’t, though.

Sometimes a cliché is the only way a tiny piece of truth can reach a mass audience. Of course I’m thinking of the car advert that cashes in on a catch phrase: “Life’s a journey, enjoy the ride.”

Ursula K LeGuin put it this way: “It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.” I’m telling you that the journey is all that most of us will ever know. Few people reach their heart’s destination. I guess you might as well enjoy the ride.

Artist Georgia O’Keeffe came to a similar conclusion in 1923.“I found myself saying to myself, I can’t live where I want to . . . I can’t go where I want to . . . I can’t even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to . . . that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself.”

And, if you’ve ever seen Georgia’s paintings of bare bones and deserts, you know the rest of the story . . . this was precisely how she found her true north. I’m searching for mine. Again.

Amongst the ego’s lost and found items. You’d think that this would be a once-off thing. That once you’ve found something, it stays found. Apparently not. I once worked with someone who understood this only too well. When I got like this, he told me to go home, throwing bits of Nietzsche after me as consolation.“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas that we conquered long ago,” is what Nietzsche said.

I’m telling you that this is an understatement. We’re attacked by blood-thirsty monsters we’ve conquered ages ago, delirious dragons we’ve already slain. How is it that they can blow their fetid breaths down our necks again when we’re tired?

If we are willing to delve deeper, we may discover that there is an underlying cause for our exhaustion, says author Madisyn Taylor. Whenever you are feeling run down, take an honest look at the way in which you’ve been feeling, thinking and acting. You’re sure to find a behaviour pattern, belief or even a relationship that is out of alignment with who you really are, Madisyn says.

It’s all very well to read this when you’re feeling good, but what do you do when the mood keeps plummeting? Business coach and life strategist Lorraine Cohen gives the following advice:

“Notice where your thoughts are focused. What stories and dramas are you creating? Are they serving to help you feel better or worse? If you’re unable to let dramas go immediately, exaggerate it big. Really act it out and play with it so that it becomes absurd. It might even become funny!”

Once you’re out of plummeting mode you might notice that the reasons you feel run-down have less to do with how much you are doing and more to do with the fact that you would rather be doing something else.

If this is true for you, repeat after me. I’m going to paraphrase something that author Anita Pathik-Law said. It goes like this:

Hello, monster. Thanks for travelling with me thus far, for I have grown immensely because of you. Today I step into a greater truth of who I am and why I am here.

Right here, right now, I declare my commitment to be who I am, and who I am is incredible. So it is. And it is so.