How To Make Your Own Day

How To Make Your Own Day

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Lately I can’t watch anything new on TV. I keep rewatching shows and sitcoms I’ve already seen a hundred time before. I think it’s because it’s comforting, knowing what will happen. There’s no room from uncertainty. I do this, I think, when I feel off balance, like I couldn’t handle something novel, so I rewatch The Office again. The comfort of something familiar is calming, even if it is a little bizarre.

So much of mental health, and life in general, depends on acceptance of what is. The only way to get through discomfort is to accept that you are feeling it. The only way to stop worrying is to accept the present and take our focus off of the future. The future we’re concerned with may never come to be, so why think about it at all? I think we undervalue the effect acceptance can have. This is where I am, and who I am. It is neither good or bad. It simply is.

Small things can make your day. A text from a friend recalling a dream you were in can turn everything around. Or seeing a cat on the beach. Or a ‘wet paint’ sign that the author decided to add an exclamation mark to. WET PAINT! – something as silly as that can change your day.

So much of being a poet is being present enough to observe things. Little things that might go unnoticed otherwise. And what I’ve found is that this process of observing serves so much more purpose than enabling good poetry. It allows you to find incredible joy in the most mundane things. Like being on a train and watching it’s body bend through the tunnels like a giant snake. Or watching a dog run towards the water as if this is the only day that could ever matter.

And maybe that’s the trick to all of this. Living as if each day is the only day that matters. Not concerning ourselves with what we may have to do tomorrow, or what we did yesterday. Just being here and now, breathing and watching the dogs sprint towards the ocean.