You wake up tired and grumpy. You don’t want to get out of bed but you have to. You drag yourself out…
Here are 5 ways science says you can turn around a bad day:
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What Strengths were You Born with?
Jenny sat at the back of the bus, her nose buried in her Nancy Drew book. She was a bit of an ackward kid and didn’t fit in with the other girls. She liked to play while rough while they pretended to bake and played with dolls.
She loved this book and was reading furiously. A young woman in the book was taken hostage and suddenly Jenny thought, “What if that happened to me?” She looked over her shoulder and stared at the car behind the bus craning her neck to get a look at the driver. It was a woman in frumpy dress and pearl. “Not someone who would take a hostage,” Jenny thought..
She looked around at the other kids on the bus and thought, “These guys wouldn’t have a clue about how to take a hostage.” But then the bus driver, Sam, caught her eye. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt. He had a moustache. This was the kind of guy that could take a hostage…
Speak Up.
A friend is 40 minutes late for our coffee date but I give him a hug and act as if he is on time. A colleague doesn’t show up for a meeting we’ve had planned for a long time, but I shrug it off and reschedule. The internet install guy drags out a simple procedure that should take 20 minutes so that it takes over 3 hours, but I smile, make polite conversation and laugh at his jokes.
I have gotten good at acting as if everything is fine. I have gotten good at hiding my anger. I have gotten good at avoiding conflict at all costs.
Shame and Sickness
Delicious lentil soup brought over by a friend.
I am in bed again. For the sixth day… Although I haven’t stayed in bed as diligently this time. I get up, I go to work for half a day, I become exhausted, I go back home, back to bed.
The moments when I am able to relax into the sickness and simply rest are beautiful, restful. But there are lots of moments that are not…
The Uncertainty is Nearly Killing Me…
In her most recent book, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, best-selling author Dani Shapiro writes,
When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don’t want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again.
I am sitting in a café with large windows, light streaming in, jazz music playing. At this point, I have an idea, a working title, a little piece of inspiration. I am starting over again. I don’t know how this piece will turn out but I do know that before I leave the cafe I’ll have a first draft.
There is a little bit of uncertainty – roughly 45 minutes of uncertainty – involved in writing this post. And that amount of uncertainty is manageable for me. Bite sized.
This is what shame feels like…
Studying Rest
Kootenay Lake, British Columbia
At the end of my last blog post on being quarantined on Christmas day I wrote,
In 2016, I am going to prioritize rest.
And now, on January 7th less than 10 days into the year, I’m realizing I don’t know what exactly that would mean. There are some things I can do that are straight-forward, make sure I get enough sleep, not fill my calendar completely full. But other parts of rest feel more elusive.
