Recipe for a fulfilling day (a reminder for my future self) (dec 27 2021)

On a good day, you’re unbothered to wake to the sound of somebody else’s alarm at 530am. Your only protest will be against parting, as you sleepily give and receive pleasure before they take their leave and you fall back asleep in a satisfied haze.

What might you dream of, in the hours of new-sleep you steal from the morning? On a good day, it will be of tenderness and warmth, of safety and of peace.

When you wake again and reality asserts itself, you won’t linger under its weight for too long. Movement and momentum are the foes of the dark shadows that creep from under the pillow.

A good day will bring clear weather and a clear mind, and a quick bicycle ride will remind you that you are alive and have a body, and that this is a triumph worth celebrating.

Every day is a good day to take coffee and a cookie for breakfast and set the buzzing of the bees in your brain to a satisfied humming.

On a busy day, heavy with obligation, you may spend your morning chained to your inbox, to your calendar, to your own anxiety. But not every day is a busy day. On rare days you will instead quietly read the works of a great poet and you will allow yourself to be moved to deep feeling by the intermingling of his words and your own dreams and memories.

When you return home, on such a day, you might be spurred to do something romantic, like pen a birthday letter to a lover not seen in years, your first and only night together a lifetime ago and a world away. When she calls in response you’re transported, the power of memory once again proving the lie of time and space.

There are so many days where you finish one task and forget to start the next, where you wander your apartment aimlessly and feel your thoughts pull you in every direction at once.

But on a really good day you will corral the chaos in your head towards the birth of something new, maybe even the first hints of that novel you always wanted to write. You might sit down to sketch the story and realize it is your own, that you have something to say now, about art and beauty and the meaning of it all. Words will flow from your pen until your excitement cannot be contained, or the muse quiets, or both, and you will feel charged into motion!

On the best of days you will drive your motorcycle too fast in the rain and laugh out loud as you fly, thinking of that Billy Joel lyric¹ and how only you would find it aspirational. When you arrive at your destination you will lift weights or climb rocks or run miles and abandon your thoughts to exult in the physical.

On these days the sheer momentum of your own excited movement through the world eventually pushes you back to the drafting table and before you know it, your hand is hovering over the word ‘publish’.

There has never been a day where thinking of sharing your work hasn’t been terrifying, and there has never been a day where you haven’t wanted to. Most days, you do it, because the need to be seen is stronger than the fear of being misunderstood. On a good day, you do so with excitement.

On a good day, your creative energy spent, you take a shower in silence and the quiet is comforting.

Some nights, the mind turns, and mental ghosts haunt over-trodden paths. But not tonight.

No, not tonight.

Because today was a good day.

[1]

Even rode my motorcycle in the rain

And you told me not to drive

But I made it home alive

So you said that only proves that I’m insane

You May Be Right — Billy Joel