Welcoming and leveraging “Down days” (Part Three)

Around the corner, as always, there’s still one question left that we must absolutely address and that’s if we lived in a smooth, totally perfect universe in which all days feel perfect, what would happen to us poor humans as we would get everything we can wish for, and some? 

How would it feel to have lives that would be endlessly smooth, easy and happy? Would it finally be the bliss we all seek and call happiness? 

I’m not so sure! We’d get terribly bored very quickly and soon we would grow into folks that are impossible to satisfy. Even if our lives are pretty good, a down day or a few difficulties, some mild suffering or strong frustrations remain a blessing because they’ll make us fully appreciate the comfort and ease of all our other days. 

So let’s remember that when a not-so-good-day gets our attention, we should see it as simply and innocuously as a bright punctuation mark into a smoothly written text. It simply calls our attention to how lucky we are to only have to deal with episodic traumas, dramas and inconveniences. There is a deeper lesson here that I think is particularly worth exploring as we grow older: happiness may depend less on how many good days we accumulate than on how well we learn to recognize them. 

We can spend a great deal of time waiting for something exciting to happen, for a new achievement, a special occasion, or an exceptional experience. Meanwhile, the ordinary days pass by almost unnoticed and often totally ignored. Yet those quiet days often make up the greater part of our lives. 

We don’t need perfection to be totally happy as a little “texture” helps us remember that Formica was unwittingly created to quickly become boring and out of style! 

If we can lodge that reflex response into our mind it will go a very long way and at the very least remind us to be super grateful for all the other days that would even fall into the “boring” category! 

We can’t guarantee ourselves a life without down days. But we can work toward a life in which down days create less influence in our minds, while good days shine a much warmer light into our hearts.