Today was just one of those days where everything feels empty. When even your footsteps thud gloomily. The corners of your mouth don’t have the strength to smile. Everyone woke up just to be rude. It’s days like this where my brain returns to one certain muse like a skipping record – I just want to go Home. I just want to run away. 

When asked what I really want to do, I realize I’m in the mood to hit up a local gym and shoot basketball for a few hours. Alone. Maybe some Hans Zimmer soundtrack music. But more than isolation, I crave the physical sensations of rhythm and memory. Catch, spin, bounce, shoot, run. And occasionally if I get smacked upside the head with a misgauged rebound, all the better. At least I’m alive.  

And that’s just it, these sensations are all part of being alive, and there’s something incredible about that simple truth. I can feel things. The frustration, the anger, the annoyance – those “bad” feelings manifest themselves through the swoosh of blood through my heart. The clench of my teeth or the sweatiness of my palms. Imagine your emotions in solitary confinement, four walls of stone and an empty floor. And then imagine being released, free to feel those things once hidden. You would embrace the hot, burning frustration over the vast drift of emotionless calm. To feel is to be living. 

Even better, we embrace the bad as it contrasts against the good. For every head-pounding, eye-squinting sunrise, there’s a morning where I pop out of bed like a bluebird in spring and start planning my day. 

If every day was a slice of cake delivered on a plate of perfection, would we continue to think the cake was delicious? Would you be as thankful for spring if you’d never felt the sting of winter? Perhaps you’re not a short-sighted human, but I take the good things for granted faster than you can type #blessed. 

As the years pass, I’m learning to thank God for the bad days, too. I am neither a Mary Poppins nor a masochist, I simply think that bad days make the good days even better. There’s nothing like heading in to work and thinking – at least a patient isn’t screaming at me right now. Or – at least I didn’t burn myself with the curling iron again. See? Bad days can work on almost anything. 

All of this being said, there are legitimate seasons in life when every sunrise feels like darkness. When there are no popping bluebird moments and your footsteps seem to thud every day of the week. Depression is real and scary, diagnosed by a board-certified psychiatrist or not. If that sounds like you, talk to someone. Talking isn’t a fix-all, but finding the right person to confide in can be the most important step in getting better. 

Silver linings don’t work on everything. In fact, some things are too sorrowful to be twisted into those positive, empowering quotes that your aunt shares on Instagram. Death, for instance. There was never a moment after my dad’s passing that I thought to myself – You know, at least I have a warm bed to sleep in at night. Some pain cannot be rationalized. It cannot be made right.

I have, however, learned to think to myself – I’m so thankful I still have my mom. And maybe that’s the end-of-the-train-track lesson. Let the bad days and the bad things teach us. Let them be real, neither shunned nor coddled. But let them be. 

Grief led me to call my mom more often. It pushed me into conversations with her that I savor, aware now that the child-parent relationship cannot stretch on forever. Heartbreak led me to apologize to Tommy more quickly and to forgive him without demanding he dance through the gauntlet of appropriate penance.

Failure in school and work taught me that my life must be about more than just “success.” And broken friendships caused me to work harder to preserve the good ones I have. 

I don’t know why God lets bad things happen. That’s a question for another day and requires an answer no one with feet on earth can answer. But I really do believe He can be trusted. After all, I am staring at a dirty speckle on the bark of a single tree, where God can see the detail of every tree, leaf, and root in the entire forest. And someday, perhaps not even in my lifetime, He’s going to transform those dry spindly branches and the muddy paths and dying ferns into something beautiful and good. I’m going to have to chill out about that for now. 

In the mean time, I’ll do my best to look at this bad day in the same way I look at soggy socks. Man, this is cold and miserable, but it’ll be so nice when I finally get to take them off and stick these purple toes in front of the fire. Some days, the anticipation of the good will just have to be enough.