These are the Days.

I always think there is a reason why I have crappy days. There are days when I wonder just how I am going to manage to get myself where ever it is I need to go without having a total meltdown. There are times when the blackness just seems to blanket me with no hope of escape.
I believe the reason I have such crappy days is to show me just how wonderful a good day really can be, and that good day, my dear friends, was today.
There was nothing special about today, nothing to celebrate, it wasn't a holiday, nothing out of the ordinary going on, in fact, when I woke up this morning things were quite the opposite.
I had a filling fall out yesterday and between then and now it has gotten progressively more painful, and as luck would have it, I cannot get in to the dentist until at least Monday; maybe later; yay for me.
Seems funny that a day starting like that could do a total one-eighty, but believe it or not, it did.
I won't kid you and tell you something magical happened to perk me up this morning, truth be told, the magic was in the copious amounts of Tylenol I took to deaden the pain. I should probably not use the word copious, I took one more than the recommended amount for an adult, but it got the job done, and instead of having a crazed lunatic with a chainsaw and a bad hangover taking up residence in my upper jaw, I found all that remained was one little elf who lazily tinked a tiny nail with a tiny hammer.
Ooooooooooh; relief. I found that the pain was deadened enough that I could go about my day, getting chores crossed off my list, eating lunch (which I never thought would happen) and I even decided to go do the most dreaded task of all~~ grocery shopping.
So off I went with no other earthly intention than to get some fresh air and snag a couple of bargains while getting some nummies for the following week. I found everything I wanted, and as I was putting the groceries on the conveyor belt at the checkout, a very nice thing happened. The store manager, who is an extremely nice man, came over and got the heavy items off the bottom of the cart and put them up with the rest of my groceries.
Small thing, you may well comment, but it was the start. Small things lead to big things, (remember this the next time you see an oak tree) and while I was loading the groceries into the trunk of my car, another nice thing took place. I happened to look up and see a sea gull.
I might mention, for those of you who are not from the Atlantic provinces, that sighting a seagull is really not an amazing thing. They are a dime a dozen around here, and are generally looked upon as a nuisance, especially when they leave their calling card on your freshly washed and waxed car.
It was not so much SEEING the seagull that was nice, but just seeing it lazily flying, going wherever it is seagulls usually need to go at that time of the afternoon, and I thought to myself just how nice it must be to be able to do that, and just be so....I don't know, I guess in tune with everything going on, feeling the breeze, seeing the earth from up there, and feeling the sun warm on it's back.
I don't know if the seagull was happy, but it made me happy thinking that on a nice day like today that it was having a good day too, and once again nice things just seemed to...happen.
I must stop my story for a moment and mention a TV commercial I remember from a couple years ago. I forget what car company made the commercial, but it showed a man and a woman in a nice vehicle, driving down a street, and they were playing music on the car's stereo system, and there was a man on the sidewalk bouncing a basketball and it seemed that it was keeping time with the song, and then it started to rain and the windshield wipers also kept time with the music, and the whole thing just became an exercise in synchronicity, all the while extolling the virtues of this very lovely car in hopes that the viewer would run out to that dealership and grab one right off the lot in a fit of consumer frenzy.
Well that is sort of the way today felt once I took the time to notice the happy things. I guess synchronicity wasn't really the right word, or idea, maybe it was more like layers. I noticed how wonderful the sun felt, how pastel blue the sky was due to the fact that there was still a bit of haze off the coast, and that in turn made the ocean look calm and peaceful, which made it a good day for people to play at the beach, due to the fact that it was a warm day, and each happy thing just kept layering itself on top of the previous happy thing to the point where I just had to sit and try to capture it all in my mind.
I arrived home and just sat in the car with the door open, looking at what was familiar to me, thinking about how nice the doves sounded as they cooed on the roof of the church, and how if I took a deep breath I could smell so many different things like mowed grass and flowers and salt air and even diesel fumes, and how all these things just came together and somehow smelled 'right', and how it seemed that there was a small, cool breeze that washed across my face each time the sun pulsed down on me, and how even voices down the street seemed to sound right, or maybe even feel right, although I couldn't make out what it was they were saying, or even needed to, for that matter.
All these things, and the thousand other things that I know happened, but being a mere mortal I failed to pick up on, just kept layering one on top of the other until I was totally blanketed in a most awesome day. It was wonderful.
I had a friend tell me, just a couple of days ago, a saying that his mother told him about the importance of saving even your pennies~~ 'pennies lead to knickels, knickels lead to dimes...' and so on, and I thought about that today when all this was happening. A helping hand leads to a seagull, a seagull leads to a beautiful sky...and so on until you have something so good that you need to share it with your friends, and to also tuck away in your secret heart place for when the black comes again and covers over your sun.
And so, my friends, I will leave you with a present. It won't look like much, just a button, but it will be what you can use to help transform a very bad day into a very good one.
When it seems like your just overloaded with a day that is fast spiralling downward, please feel free to come back right here and push my little button you saw at the top of this story. It will unleash all the layers you will need to turn a bad day into a wonderful one. Use it as many times as you need to, it is free for everyone who needs to see a seagull.