Day 3 - Melancholy

Yesterday was a hard day. Maybe it's the post-holiday blues, where life is forced to return back to normal and the daily routine haunts me. Maybe it was the lack of sleep from being up all night with a sick child. Maybe it's the events happening in my life that seem to bring up emotions I would rather leave behind. Or perhaps it's the weight and unhealthiness I feel on my body. Maybe it's a little bit of everything. I just felt depressed, angry, and melancholy. It's hard to find hope in all of that; it's hard to write about hope in all of that.

After some restlessness and self-pity, I picked up my current book and started reading.  I was reading about how our busy life robs us of joy. We are too busy to be thankful for all of the blessings around us, even our children. We treat every moment like an emergency to get out of the house and be on time. What are we missing by doing that? With a busy and chaotic life we can never live in the moment and see all the goodness around us. In fact, our hurry hurts our family. It made me think of my melancholy state and all of the time I spent yesterday worried about other things. I robbed myself of that time to have joy. I robbed my family of that time. And yet, I didn't have the energy to be happy. Isn't it in those times that we should be thanking God for all of the goodness around us, the things we cannot see when we are blinded by sadness? I may not have been busy, but I certainly was declaring my depression an emergency, and I let it outshine the life of my family and our time together.

In all of that clutter, how am I supposed to feel hope? Apparently the answer is to be grateful, to give thanks, and to look around and see all of the blessings around you every single moment. To be thankful that your children are breathing and that they can hug and kiss you. To see the beauty in a sunset or the smell of clean laundry. For me, I know that depression is not something you can turn on or off, just as I know that we cannot magically have a less busy life. But, we can train ourselves to be more grateful every time we feel our life slipping a bit. Every time we feel consumed by an emotion or an event we can remind ourselves to look at the good around us and to thank God for what He has given us. We can do that. We can take a moment to tell God that we are grateful. And I can see now, that by living with more thankfulness, we can begin to pass by the busyness or the melancholy and see hope more clearly. We will be less stranded and weighed down by life and commitments or emotions, and more open to seeing beauty and believing that our life can be beautiful too. That is living for hope.