How to Reset a Hard Day

Yesterday I told you I was setting the backpack down.

Today I want to tell you what happened when I picked it back up, because that is the part I actually needed to learn.

I woke up sad again.

Not a small sad. The kind that is already sitting on your chest before your feet hit the floor.

There is a particular grief that does not wait for an anniversary or a holiday or a hard conversation. There is no funeral, no casserole, no card in the mail. The situation is simply the situation, so the grief has nowhere official to go. It shows up on an ordinary Tuesday and sits down.

Before you read the rest of this, go read Psalm 42. The whole thing, and then keep going into Psalm 43. There is a reason I am asking you to read both.

The second domino

For a long time, a morning like that could take my entire day.

I would feel emotionally exhausted, physically depleted, and unable to focus on anything. I already live with chronic fatigue, and stress makes it worse. So the sadness never only cost me the feeling.

It cost me the hours.

And then came the part nobody warns you about.

The next day I would wake up already behind. Work had piled up. Now I was carrying yesterday's grief and today's pressure at the same time.

One hard morning becomes a hard day. A hard day becomes a hard week. And somewhere in there you start believing the sadness is bigger than it actually is, when really it just got help.

Grief can visit without taking over the entire house.

I did not always know that. I learned it recently enough that I still have to practice it on purpose.

Which is what today was.

How I reset the day

Here is exactly what I did, in order. It is not complicated and that is rather the point.

• I let myself feel it. I did not push it down or talk myself out of it or tell myself it was silly to be crying on a Tuesday.
• I named it. Out loud, to God, in plain words. This is grief. This is what it is about.
• I wrote about it. That is my way. Yours might be calling a trusted friend, or sitting in your prayer chair until you can breathe a little easier.
• I prayed through it. Not a tidy prayer. The honest one.
• Then I stood up.
• I changed my environment. I left the room where I had been sitting in it.
• I went for a short walk.
• I came home and got into a cold shower and restarted the day.
• Then I made myself think about everything I love.

And it worked. Not the way I would have wanted at twenty-five, where the feeling disappears and never comes back.

The sadness did not vanish. I simply stopped letting one painful moment decide what the rest of my day would become.

Scripture Study

Psalm 42 and 43

The psalmist is far from home, cut off from the temple, taunted by people asking where his God is. He says his tears have been his food day and night. And then, in the middle of it, he stops and speaks directly to himself. Why are you downcast, my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him.

Look at what he actually does there.

He does not wait to feel better. He does not wait for the situation to change or for anyone to explain why it happened.

He interrupts himself. He grabs hold of what he is feeling and talks back to it.

That is the reset. It is three thousand years old and somebody wrote it down while it was happening to him.

Dig Deeper

Here is the part that undid me this morning, and it is why I asked you to read both psalms.

He says it three times.

Psalm 42:5. Again in Psalm 42:11. A third time in Psalm 43:5. The same words, nearly identical.

And in many ancient Hebrew manuscripts, Psalms 42 and 43 are one psalm. Psalm 43 has no title of its own. They share the refrain and were meant to be read together.

Which means this is not a man resetting on three different days. It is one man, in one stretch of despair, having to talk himself down three separate times because the first one did not hold.

If the psalmist needed three, then me needing to reset twice before lunch is not a character flaw.
It is what the practice actually looks like.

Two things in the language are worth knowing. The Hebrew for downcast is shachach, bowed down or brought low. The word for disturbed is hamah, which carries the sense of growling or moaning, like an animal in distress.

He does not spiritualize any of it. He names what it feels like in his body.

And then there is the smallest word in the refrain, doing the heaviest work.

I will yet praise Him.

Not I feel better. Not I am fine now. Not the trouble has passed.

Yet.

Not now. Coming.

Did You Know

There is a stretch of the Camino Frances called the meseta. A long flat plateau where the scenery stops changing and there is not much to look at but yourself.

I have read a lot of pilgrim accounts of that section while planning this trip, and the advice that keeps coming up is not what I expected.

It is rarely push harder.

It is stop. Take a rest day. Change the town. Change something.

I do not know yet what that stretch will feel like for me. But I noticed that the people who have already walked it seem to talk about resetting far more than they talk about grinding.

What today became

After the walk and the cold shower, I sat down and worked.

I wrote a letter for this series. I wrote a Hey You note. I wrote three letters for the Camino Chronicles. I made edits on the book.

And then I did the fun parts.

I put on my favorite song and danced around my bedroom trying on the new hiking pants.

I put the pins on my pack.

My younger daughter made me a bag charm. It has a compass on it. The note said, so I can find my way home.

Then I found something I had bought months ago and completely forgotten about. Little lightweight cross bookmarks, small enough that carrying a handful costs me nothing. I am going to leave them along the road, or give them to people I meet.

I looked at the rock I am carrying with me. I wrote something on it a while back.

That part stays between me and the road.

What I will tell you is what I am laying down at the cross when I leave it there. Guilt. Sadness. Anger. Grief.

That does not mean I will never feel any of it again. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I would not want you to either.

It means it is in His hands now, and it is not in mine.

And then I finished the workday with a cookie, because small wins are still wins and I have decided to celebrate them.

I did not choose to wake up sad. I chose the walk. I chose the cold water. I chose to sit down and work anyway. The sadness was not up to me. The next hour was.

The third option

I am an extremely emotional person. I feel things all the way down. That can be beautiful. It is also exhausting.

For years I thought there were only two ways to handle it. Shut it out, or let it flood.

It turns out there is a third one.
You feel it, and then you choose what happens next.

I want to be careful here, because I am not telling you to choose your way out of grief. You cannot. I could not.

What I am telling you is that the grief and the choice are two different things, and they are allowed to exist in the same day.

Paul wrote that we are troubled on every side, yet not distressed. Cast down, but not destroyed.

I used to read that as a promise that the trouble would leave.

Now I read it and hear something better. The trouble gets to be real.

It just does not get the last word.

Reflection

Write honestly or do not write at all. Nobody is reading this but you.

1. What is the thing that shows up on ordinary days without warning?
2. Have I been treating a hard morning as a verdict on the whole day?
3. What is one thing I could do that tells my body we are moving forward now?
4. What would it look like to reset twice, and not call the second one a failure?

Prayer

Camino Challenge: The Reset

The next time a hard morning shows up, try this. Do not skip the first half. That is the part everyone wants to jump over, and it is the part that makes the rest work.

• Set a timer and let yourself sit in it. Ten minutes. You are allowed.
• Name it out loud. Say what it actually is.
• Get it out of you somehow. Write it. Tell a friend. Pray it, in plain language.
• Then stand up and change your environment. Leave the room you were sitting in.
• Do one small thing that tells your body we are moving forward now. Walk outside. Wash your face. Open the blinds. Make the coffee. Play the song.
• Then think about something you love, on purpose, and let yourself be glad about it.
• And if it does not hold, do it again.

That is not failing at it. That is doing it.

Reset. Restart. As many times as you need.

Tomorrow We'll Walk...

Tomorrow I want to tell you what this kind of grief actually feels like.

Somebody asked me once and the only honest answer I had was that it is like glitter.

You find a little sparkle everywhere, months later, in places you thought you had already cleaned.

What is one thing that tells your body we are moving forward now? Write me back below. I read every one.