Someone wished me a happy day a few hours ago, leaving me wondering why. Apart from crabbily demanding to know what I had to be happy about, I glowered blearily at them and then closed my eyes for a brief moment, hoping that the rest of the oh-so-happy world would stop grinning idiotically at me and leave me to fry in peace.
I am not a negative person, in essence. Nor am I any of the usual personality traits that could conceivably make me blue, glum or otherwise bad tempered. But sometimes I wake up that way and just need to be left be, so that I can indulge my feeling of being mean, nasty, grouchy, squabbly, annoyedly blah.
Why would I be that way? On a day that was all about sunshine and a cool breeze, chocolate truffles and mint jujubes, warm hugs and cool clothes? Simple. Because I want to be that way. It makes me happy. It gives me joy. It leaves me fabulously, self-indulgently, bathetically miserable, enough to find an astonishing amount of happiness in small things like a cuddle from Small Cat, a laugh from Father or a toothless smile from a wrinkled old lady hobbling across my path as I drove in to work.
And then I had to stop and think. What did I have to be miserable about, really? Actually, honestly, frankly, nothing. I have a loving and affectionate family of one and a half, lots of loving and affectionate friends, a loving and affectionate boss, albeit an irascible one, a job that seems to be affectionate enough to me and a life most would envy – with the perfect blend of warm and fuzzy and sparkly and inspiring. And, as I walked into the vast hall where I manage that aforementioned job, I was greeted with a brilliantly blinding smile from one of the office boys making a brief stop in his routine of chores to help me with the sliding pile of books that I was toting. I smiled back, something in me lifted out of the proverbial doldrums.
It is small things like this that make my day what it is – sunny and cheerful. So why did I need to be grouchy, crabby and so irritable? The thought surfaced again during our edit meeting, when the aforementioned (again) irascible boss chortled into his well salted beard at his own talent with linguistic acrobatics and my colleagues cracked the silliest jokes about almost nothing. And as I exchanged mild doses of gossip with a friend and sipped on my zillionth mug of steaming hot water, the last of the bad-temperedness vanished. I was myself again. Undaunted, unruffled, unfazed.
Maybe that wish to be happy did the trick!
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