The cat who wakes me up at night if my door is not open to his liking.
Sometimes I wake up feeling a little sad.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t sleep so well a few nights ago. It’s very good having my youngest child home for the Christmas holiday. But it also means that I tend to stay up a little later than usual, and my child stays up later than me, and sometimes leaves lights on and falls asleep on the couch. The problem with this is that I have to leave my bedroom door cracked a little, so the cat can come and go as he pleases. I’ve shut my door in the past so that the living room lights don’t bother me, but then the cat decides that he needs to enter and scratches at the door and meows until I get up and open it. So my door has to stay open, which means I can see the lights, just a little.
I woke up a few times, saw that the lights were still on, but managed to go back to sleep and ignore them. But at 4:30 am, I woke up enough to stumble into the living room, turn off the lights, and say something slightly snarky to the child who was asleep on the couch. There was then a good deal of rumbling around the living room as he got up and staggered to bed, where his blissful sleep continued. Except mine didn’t; I didn’t go back to sleep at all. My alarm sounded at 5:30 am, because you know, I’ve been trying to set it so that I get up in the morning and do things that make my day go better, like writing these posts!
Also the other day, my son’s dentist called and needed to reschedule the appointment that we made months ago. Then our doctor called and said the same thing, that we needed to reschedule the appointments I made in September because the doctor would be out of the office that week.
Isn’t this something they should have known before they set the appointments months ago? The doctor just decided this week that she doesn’t want to work Christmas week?
I’m listening to a book called “Happiness for Beginners” by Katherine Center. It was made into a Netflix special, which I haven’t watched yet. In the book, the main character is encouraged to focus on things that make her happy—not things that make her sad. It’s good advice, of course. It says, “Happy people are more likely to register joy than unhappy people. So if you take two people who have experienced a day of, say, fifty percent good things and fifty percent bad things, an unhappy person would remember more of the bad.”
Sometimes, unfortunately? I’m a person who remembers the bad. I can focus on things that go wrong. I was so annoyed by the dual doctors’ offices calling to switch things around! And then I didn’t sleep that well, and my phone even confirmed this, telling me for the first time ever that my sleep was only okay and that I might not have gotten sufficient rest. Bother!
Except. I was able to call back the dentist and the doctor’s office, and we were able to work things out. Sure, I had to rearrange my work appointments, but the office manager was kind and figured it out for me. I was a little tired that day, but I made it through, and it was a fine day after all.
What would it be like to focus on how it worked out, to start a blog post with that instead of with the problems that annoyed me—to have the first line of this piece be something like, “I didn’t sleep great last night, but it’s going to be okay.” That would feel better (but might not be as interesting of a blog post). I will still wake up some days feeling sad, and there are reasons to be sad—many, many of them. I won’t ever erase that emotion from my life, and I don’t want to. Sad is not bad—but maybe I can consciously shift my attention back to the fifty percent (or more) of my day that was fine, and many times even better than fine.
There are lots of things that are making me happy now. My Moroccan Mint Mindfulness tea. My Spotify playlist. The rain that that will clear the fog that has landed in the Valley and in the Auburn area for days now—possibly weeks? I am grateful that my little town hasn’t had fog; we’ve had brilliant, sunny, warm days, until this rain moved in. I am lucky to have my child home for Christmas break. I am lucky to live in this little town where I wave at just about everybody who drives by and they wave back, whether we know each other or not.
One last quote from the “Happiness for Beginners” book: “The things we remember are what we hold on to. And what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives.”
Merry Christmas, friends. May your Christmas this week be blessed, and may you hold on to the moments that are full of light, making them a cherished part of your wild, wonderful life story.
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