Mornings are hard in the middle of December.  The sun does not show its face till 9 or later.  So lucky that we have Sheba to be our alarm clock.  She is quite persistent.  If licks on the face, runs at the bed doesn’t work, she will resort to loud barking to get us out of bed.  I am hungry!  I am hungry!  Get up!  Get up!  What is the matter with you people?

So another day begins.  It is 7:25 and we have slept in!  I think about hopping on the exercise bike with my book and mug of tea for a few minutes but thought was all I did.  Oh tomorrow is another day.  I will have to remember that for tomorrow and not let myself down and slide on the slippery slope of will power.  I am an adult after all.

So, this is another morning.  Wake up call again..at 7.  I get up, remembering my promise to get on the exercise bike.  I am feeling low and tired.  It is not visions of sugar plums dancing I see in my head, but the shooting at the school in Connecticut.  It is the cares of the world I am feeling along with my own uncertainties and heaviness.  But time has been my best teacher.  All the thinking and feeling and trying to understand and figure things out has not helped me in the past.

And so I sigh, get out of bed, make my tea and head downstairs to the bike.  I turn on my SAD light and set my timer for 16 minutes.  Those minutes are long and short at the same time.  My thighs ache and I stop to rest and sip my tea.  Hurry, hurry, get going!  Only 16 minutes.  You want to get going to get some good.  Only 16 minutes to read this book.  Pedal!  Pedal!

The 16 minutes are over and so is breakfast.  Those feelings of despair for the world come and go.  When they come, I remember that it does me no good to think and feel them.  I get up and move.  I put the breakfast dishes in the washer.  I wipe the counter.  I put away the towels someone has folded for me.  I sucked up Sheba’s hair off the floor in the kitchen, dining room and sun room with the electric Swifter.

The sun is out and I am sitting here, tap, tapping out my words.  What I am thinking now is about the irony of our world, our lives.  This is the time when we do have the world at our fingertips.  With a touch of a button, we can send a message across the world.  We can talk via Skype to someone on the other side of the globe.  We are more connected than ever.  Yet at the same time, we are more isolated than ever.  I am missing those times when we were more brave, daring…to be vulnerable and talk to each other, face to face, on the phone.  I miss those times when we were not afraid to be friends and say, I like you, I miss you.  I need you.

I count myself lucky that I can feel all these feelings.  Sometimes they are a BIG nuisance.  You have a life to live, you know, and you have to flog through all the heaviness of feeling, just to get out of bed.  But the rewards of trying and doing are very much worth it.  Cultivating good habits help.  I love Regina Brett’s:  Get up, dress up, show up.  Every time I can do that, I know that I am a success.

I find that I can accomplish great things if I show up.  Sometimes our worst of times can be our best of times.  My sun room is the best testimony to that.  Because of my ‘condition’ of Seasonal Affective Disorder, I look for solutions and possibilities.  And this is the end result.

We are all builders.  So let us build good things.  Let us build a better world.  We can start with just a single block.