Tell Me What's So Bad

I remember waking up one morning in Scotland and just being happy. It wasn't some transcendent joy and it wasn't due to anything in particular, as far as I can remember. I just woke up happy. On the right side of the bed for once, I assume. It's a little bubbly feeling in your chest and a lack of headache in your temples. I was just happy, for the first time in as long as I could remember.

Monday was like that for me here. Not in the morning necessarily-- I woke up early to work on a paper-- but it was such a lovely crisp morning and I got to see the sunrise on the bus. Then at work I got to do a planetarium show and I had forgotten how much I love doing shows. My friends have been bearing with the brunt of my bursts of astronomy passion in the past couple of weeks as I send them quotes from adorable children or pictures of artifacts in the Air and Space Museum or yet another expression of how happy I am to be back working the telescopes and editing curricula. I had forgotten how much I loved this kind of work and the kind of people that are drawn to it. Add in the autumn that has been cascading around us the past few days and I didn't think that my little heart could be happier.

But then it was. I went from work to class, bouncing facebook messages and texts off the satellites as I walked to the metro stop, then running into some girls from my program on their way up to a different class, and having a good talk about where we're all at and what's expected from us. Later, during the break in class, one of my other classmates asked if I was okay and asked what was going on in my life and my best answer, and the truest one, was that I was in my happy place. I've been swimming in a lot of theology lately and I'm in that exciting place where I'm reading edifying material and making connections and putting pieces together and having lovely, deep conversations with lovely, deep people, and I don't feel like I need to slow down the spin of the wheels in my brain. I don't know what my face is doing while that thinking is happening (I've been told I look somewhere between distraught and distracted), but I love letting my brain chase ideas down. I love letting it explore. And it brings me so much joy when an idea clicks into place that I have a tendency to confuse the messenger with the message, forgetting that what I've been looking for is the spark and not the human that evidences it, but right now, I'm just happy that so much is pouring into my brain and wedging its way into my soul. It feels like everything I ever wanted.

I know that we only get a fleeting number of days and I know that one day, barring any kind of intervention, the Earth will be consumed by the Sun and everything we ever loved will be obliterated by the heat of a dying star, but I could live for days like Monday, where the good was more than sufficient and the bad did not suffocate, where the world was beautiful around me and the people near me kind. My disparate passions have found their way into life, all at once.

Monday was one of those days that showed you what to wish for.

We could all use that sometimes.

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Today's blog post title comes to you from the song Happy by John Fulbright.