Today has been a pretty good day, start to finish. When I woke this morning I had one of those moments that are pretty rare for me: one of absolute calm and lightness. As I began stirring this morning, before the usual rush of thoughts and end-of-the-month worries that often flood in on me before I am even good and awake, I had a moment of what I described in my morning journal as “okayness.”
“Whatever one might call it, it was good…A glimpse of what it feels like to wake up feeling okay. Like what you might feel like waking up the morning or two after winning the lottery–not a megamillions, maybe not even one million, bit a nice sum like $10,000 or something smaller that offers a bit of breathing space. So perhaps that’s it–I had of feeling what it will feel like to have a bit of breathing space in my life: unhurried, unworried, content, okay. I do not need to be riotously happy; I want to be content (or is it contented). Perhaps contentment is what riotously happy settles into, what it matures into, what it deepens into…yeah, that sounds good. So I’m not sure what that moment was this morning, and I’m not going to grasp after it, or reproduce it, or try to make it bigger–as if I could. Perhaps it was simply my Spirit’s way of letting me know what’s ahead of me as I move forward with gratitude, generosity and The Four Immeasurables…”I must say I thoroughly enjoyed my moment of okayness this morning, as the segment of my journal entry indicated. For some people okayness is ho-hum, perhaps it is their normal state. For me, okayness is probably close to what other folks might describe as bliss. As one who has struggled with depression for the better part of my life, waking up feeling okay can be a really lovely thing. This has been particularly true over the past several months when I often awaken with a sense of anxiety about all of the challenges and unresolved situations in my life. Back to my journal:
Perhaps this is what Rumi meant when he said “Awake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” This might be what a winged heart feels like. (I later remembered that it hadn’t been Rumi who’d said that, but Khalil Gibran. Hey, at 7 in the morning writing in longhand in my journal it’s not like I could look it up…)I am grateful for that moment this morning. The positive feeling of overall wellbeing gently persisted throughout most of the day, during my volunteering time at the Berkeley Food Pantry all the way through to the writing of this evening’s blog. Start to finish it has been a pretty good day. And no matter how I wake up feeling tomorrow morning, for today life is good.
© M. T. Chamblee, 2012
