Noticing good days

I am trying to remove the concept of bad days out of my mind. Meaning, I’m trying to fully understand that the way I want to think about it is that bad days don’t exist.

There are so many wonderful things about days after all.

The sun, the wind, and the rain, and the fog, and the snow, and the hot and cold. There is deep breaths. There is the chance to wiggle my toes or have a glass of water. Or I can put on a sock. I can blink, just for fun or skip if I want to.

There’s also noise and touch and light, but also silence and the gentle darkness of stars and moonlight. And there’s the feeling of having a body, and things like sweating or a grumbling stomach. Or wishing or hoping or praying for something. Or a funny joke. Or the sweet relief of weeping about something.

And for me when Robyn says “good morning” and gives me a kiss, just about makes my day right when it starts. Or a hug from one of my boys or talking to our parents. Or a quick “hey” from an old friend, too. And I get that we are lucky to be enveloped in love and our relationships are bound by life, they still exist and will have existed.

These are all examples of little joys that actually aren’t little at all.

I’ve been thinking about it like fine chocolates. Many moments in a day are simply exquisite, like a morsel of well made chocolate. But even the finest chocolate can’t be noticed as exquisite if we just put it in our mouths, hurriedly, and just crunch-crunch-crunch, swallow and move on. And these little-but-actually-big joys are the same, even the most remarkable moments aren’t remarkable if we don’t savor them when we have them.

I know that bad moments happen. Sometimes, those moments are really horrific and truly terrible. But I want to also know in my bones and muscle tissues that bad moments don’t imply bad days. Bad moments can imply hard days, sad days, angry days, or even days of hopelessness and despair. But that doesn’t have to be bad.

And all this said, I know my days could be orders of magnitude harder if we weren’t as healthy, wealthy, or loved as we are. With temporal distance, even the hardest days of my life so far, like when I’ve done things that hurt others or the day I had to let my father go ahead without me, weren’t bad. They were unbearably hard, but I don’t have to think of them as bad, as if I wanted them to be wiped from existence. 

Because if those days were wiped from existence, it’s one less day with all the good moments a day can have - even if those good moments are hidden in plain sight, waiting for us to notice them. If even one of those days were wiped from existence, I couldn’t have lived them.

And one definition of injustice to me is when there are people on this earth that have so many bad things happen to them that all the little things that can make a day good, even for a moment, remain hidden in plain sight. That they have so many struggles, and so much unbearable pain and disappointment that they aren’t capable of noticing even one good moment that day, even something as simple as the goodness of waking up from sleep or breathing.

I want my mind, my body, and my heart to understand what my soul already does: that good days don’t have to do with the trappings of how “lucky”, “blessed”, or “privileged” I am. That the “good” in a good day in life comes just from living. I want all of me to understand what my soul already does, that every day is a good day and every single one of those days matters.