A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.

You are made largely of your connections: the people who raised you, the ones you argue with, the work you are tied into, the place you live. What looks like a single separate self is a meeting point of many things arriving from outside. That is not a diminishment, it is where anything you produce actually comes from.

When you feel stuck or flat, look at your relations rather than at yourself. Which connections have gone quiet, which have gone sour, which have you not fed. Tending one of them usually does more for the whole than any amount of working on yourself alone.