7/31
i'm thankful i had really quite a good day yesterday, where i felt happy and good and everything seemed to be going my way. i'm thankful to have been talking with a friend recently, who is just starting antidepressants and who, after some initial side effects and a long time before it feeling bad all the time, had a good day, and how we discussed how when you are feeling bad all the time and then you have a good day, you can tend to get obsessive about replicating the conditions of the good day (what did i eat? did i do yoga and if so what kind and how long? did i remember to take my multivitamin? did i read a book instead of look at twitter before bed?), since you don't know if there was a single specific causal factor for the general feeling that you had a good day and so you want to try to control all the variables in the experiment that is your life, to try to build a machine that makes good days more reliably. i'm thankful that she knows and i know that life and our bodies are so complicated that total control is impossible, but i'm thankful to understand, when you feel that you are controlled by the seemingly arbitrary old testament god force of your emotions, that to feel that if you control these other things you can control them is a seductive idea.
i'm thankful that yesterday i went on my run before work instead of on my lunch break, which meant that i could run for longer and it wasn't as hot and which felt generally like a good way to start my day. i'm thankful, that of course, given my general good day and also the specific feeling of that experience, i feel compelled to run again this morning, even though it is rainy outside this morning, which it wasn't yesterday. i'm thankful to be in bed looking out the window at the bushes along the back fence to try to observe how hard it is raining, and i'm thankful for the way that when it is not raining very hard and you are looking through a window with a screen, it's hard to see rain itself in the air and so instead you have to look at the environment and how it is being affected by the rain: the easiest thing to look at is usually a puddle, where the drops are made visible breaking the water's surface, but from my vantage point in bed i can't see the ground, so instead i am looking at the bushes along the back fence and watching something i've never really watched before, which is individual leaves scattered across the bush occasionally twitching as drops of rain hit them, the force of the falling particle pushing them down quickly, and then them snapping back up as the drop of water rolls off the edge of the leaf or the branch the leaf is on rebounds against the force (i can't tell which from this distance).
i'm thankful to know that i can't force myself to have another good day, that so much is outside of my control, but i'm thankful to go out now and run in the rain anyway. i'm thankful to hope it won't be too heavy but to know that if it is, i can still keep going, it can't stop me.
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