I get a satisfying sense of fulfillment every morning when I open the blinds. Maybe it's watching my dingy little room turn from night to day, or maybe it's that feeling I get when the sun wakes my sleep-heavy skin that makes it more liberating than a caffeine addict's first cup of coffee in the morning. There is a tangible transformation as I'm able to drink in those first few rare moments of the day when my to-do list has yet to catch up to me and my dreams are still lightly pressed to the backs of my yawning eyelids.
But sometimes the light refuses to cast its hopeful glance upon my sad dorm room walls, having its normal sky blue fade to a heavy gray that suppresses any kind of natural light that fixes on it. In these instances, it slides down from the plaster and sticks to my shoes as I walk out the door, slowing me down and pulling me away from the happiness I felt yesterday, and having me believe that it's not worth the effort to find my way back. Sometimes it's just easier to close the curtains and find solace while pressed between the painless sheets draped over my mattress.
However, it's always worth the effort.
Bad days are perfect thieves. They adapt to each of us personally and are somehow sitting in our homes waiting for us not-so-patiently before we ever pull back the covers to go to sleep the night before. They will always find their way in through the open blinds and through our vulnerable cracks that we leave uncovered. As humans, we will never escape the inevitability of bad days, but they're what makes the light that accompanies the wavering blinds the next morning a little more promising.
Happiness, ironically enough, sits right outside our windows waiting to be let in with the morning light, but it also waits with the timid drizzle that matches the sleepy skies and sorrowful faces that try to predetermine a bad day before the window has ever been opened. Let it in either way. There's a certain beauty that comes with finding joy in both the raindrops that litter the grass with dew drops and the sunlight that later turns the due drops into crystals.
It's easy to fall into a simple rhythm with the overwhelming acceptance that comes with feeling sorry for ourselves, but it's easier to remember that we haven't lost it all yet. Even though the light flooded in each morning as I woke this week, I carried a heaviness with me that was contagious, and not because of what was happening around me but because of what I was letting happen within my own mind. Happiness is only as available as we let it be, so as soon as we allow the disappointment that is delivered with a bad day to consume our laughter and strangle our smiles, we will not be able to stop the snowball effect that has bad days piling on top of one another all week. These days come, but they go just as easily when we allow ourselves to notice the gift that comes with the present and the hope that tomorrow promises.
Sometimes surviving one of these days is all it takes to seek out the happiness that waits and to stop waiting for it to find us.
