SAD took over the other day, out of the blue. For no logical reason it swooped in on me and stole the happy song I’d been singing for so many weeks, leaving my heart just thumping slowly with no joyful rhythm, like heavy boots dragging toward a mission that held no purpose or value. To the person in the boots. Not the actual boots. Though I have heard that boots of combat take on the spiritual presence of the men and women walking in them. So maybe the boots are dreading the mission too. I don’t know.
I just made that up. But it could be true. Boots with their owner’s aura.
SAD, so very. From seemingly nowhere. I felt stunned and the back of my eyeballs went heavy with aching desolation. Some of you might know of this weird eyeball phenomena. It’s not tears. I do that plenty. Tears are healthy. They contain natural antidepressants. It’s GOOD to cry people.
The aching desolate eyeballs deal is an actual complication due to a heart that has gone joyless without any kind of warning from the brain thereby getting all stiff and building up pressure that is somehow linked directly to the eyeballs. And it causes temporary blindness to anything nifty.
That sounded pretty scientific huh?
Anyhow.
SAD doesn’t come that often to me. So usually I can logic my way through it. I told a friend I was trying to look at my current SAD as a heads up to pay more attention to smiling people and realize that they just might be faking and not really super happy at the moment. Or they could be on the verge of a total SAD meltdown. You just don’t know for sure. Smiling people are WARRIORS and need encouragement! They need carbs! They need people to look at them all the way to their bones and say: “I SEE you! You’re doing great! You will BE OK! Your heart will catch up with your smile if it hasn’t already today! I understand you to be STRONG, great smiling warrior!”
But I still felt SAD even with this new purpose created in my very logical brain: feeling compassion for smiling people. So I went to bed. After I ate some spaghetti.
And the next day, feeling a little better (from the carbs) I kept the smiling people idea in my head.
Enter me, into Walmart, just a few days before Christmas. People are frantic. They are rushing, grumpy, many focused on trying to make a little bit of money go a longer way than what reality deems. I waited in the long check-out line and just watched the Walmart lady cheerfully smile at vacant eyed, self-absorbed customers. That’s me so often. I just want to get my shit done and get the heck out.
But when it’s my turn in line, I smile, looking all the way into her eyes and ask “How are you holding up?” She is kind of stunned by the question for half a second and then there is this amazing transformation: the smile goes from her mouth to her EYES and she goes from an average woman to a radiant beauty.
She says to me: “I’m doing okay! Thank you. I have just been feeling really SAD because we just had an incident where this poor sweet little elderly lady had her wallet stolen. It just breaks my heart the things that happen in this world, especially during Christmas.”
I say “Oh! So sad. I’m sorry that this bad thing happened! But try and keep the faith that there is way more goodness going on than bad, yes? Don’t let SAD make you blind to that.”
“Yes!” she says, smiling at me for real; me smiling for real back at her.
And just like that the SAD vanished. I mentally waved goodbye to it and whispered “Thanks for the visit. See you next time.”
peaceof8 