This morning was bad. For various, and unfortunately ongoing, reasons, I was having a rough time of it. I was in a foul mood, with wave upon wave of angry and sad thoughts breaking over me. At first, I tried hard to fight it. I tried to remind myself to breathe and look on the brighter side of things…to remind myself that it’s futile to rage against what cannot be changed, at least for now. But all my attempts at positivity failed me. My own self-pep-talking was only pissing me off more.
So I gave in. I made a conscious decision to just let myself be as upset and miserable as I dared to be, not censoring my thoughts and letting the negative thoughts run wild.
This lasted for a couple hours. At the same time, I worked out some of my aggression and pent-up energy by baking a loaf of bread and preparing dinner for tonight. It helped somewhat to have a giant knife in my hand and chop away at things. 😛 Kidding. Sorta. And then I took lots and lots of pictures of my loaf of bread:
Incidentally, this was a new version of my Walnut and Raisin Irish Soda Bread I was trying out, and although I was happy with the flavour, I didn’t like the texture as much, so more tweaking is needed before I post the recipe. But that didn’t stop me from obsessively taking about a zillion pictures of it…
Anyways, after a couple hours or so, I started feeling better. And by the time I left for work, I was pretty calm. I don’t know what the experts would say about my way of dealing with things this morning, and I have a suspicion it wasn’t the healthiest way I could have handled it. But it worked for me, at least for today. I feel that sometimes, you just gotta let it out, let yourself really feel your emotions…have a good long cry, scream, take out your frustration on some unsuspecting yams, whatever. Then it passes through your system instead of getting all bottled up inside; your mind and body is then ready to refocus and redirect. At least that’s what works for me sometimes. But I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
It seemed like quite the coincidence when I later read that today was dubbed “Blue Monday” by a British psychologist. It’s apparently statistically the most depressing day of the year. Who knew? So there you go, that’s why I had a bad morning! 🙂
But I was already feeling loads lighter and happier by the time I read that. One of my students had cancelled at the last minute, so I took myself to the nearest Starbucks where I sat with my favourite Chai Latte and read a newspaper. (And it was in that newspaper that I learned about “Blue Monday”.) It was a lovely half hour.
And then while working, I was reminded that life cannot possibly be all that bad as long as we have a few good laughs in it. I have a student recital planned for a couple weeks from now, and my students are all busy preparing for it. One of the things I’ve asked them all to do is write me a story about the piece they’re performing, and this story will be read out at the recital before each performer goes up to play. And oh my, the creativity, imagination, and hilarity of their stories are simply too delicious!!
I’ll share one of the ones I got today:
From Madeleine, age 10, playing “Sleeping Dragon” by Nancy Telfer…(this piece starts slowly and softly, building into a frenzied and loud middle section, then subsides again into the same soft and slow part with which it began)… (I’m going to type it exactly as she wrote it, including all spelling and grammar)
The dragon is sleeping, he just fell asleep!
The dragon is dreaming, dreaming about a mouse that would make a very nice diner.
But, all of the sudden, the mouse has a growing potion, the mouse is now twice as big as the dragon. Oh no, the mouse is about to eat the dragon. But all of the sudden the potion wears off. the mouse is now normale size again. the dragon see’s the mouse and grabe’s it. Now the dragon will have a nice diner. The dragon now returns sleeping peacefuly, and snoring
the End
Goodness, I love my job! 🙂
And Joe’s in town this week! Yay!! Things are lookin’ up! Here’s to hopin’ that Blue Monday will give way to Tickled Pink Tuesday… 🙂