Michael F. DuBois

Everybody, once in a while, wakes up in one of those moods. Your eyes open, and you just lie there. Even if everything is going right in life, and you seem to have everything you could ever want, you still wake up with sadness. I think we can all relate. I think everybody has those mornings.

I had one of those mornings today.

It was like my eyes opened, and there I was. Just, there. It put me in the kind of mood where I started to think of all the bad things in my life rather than the good ones. I started to see the sadness in the world rather than all of the beauty. And it made me wonder…what goes on in our minds that makes us see darkness instead of light? How can our minds be so powerful that it can alter our mood while we are asleep? And, above all, why must we ever have to feel this way in the first place?

It took me a good hour before I could get past all of the cloudiness and fog that flooded my mind and kept me back from actually thinking clearly. Once I pushed it all aside, just for a moment, to try and understand why I must wake with this feeling, I came to a decision. I call it a decision, not an answer, because it is not an answer. An answer would mean that one simple act would fix everything, that by coming to this answer, all problems would be solved. With a decision, however, we are given the chance to begin working towards what we want.

My decision was this: If I wake every morning with complete happiness, will I ever see anything in the world that I want to work towards, that I want to help fix? We go through life these days seeing some pretty horrible things. There are homeless on the streets, pain in hearts, and hate and violence all throughout the world. We see these things everyday, on TV, in books, right in front of our own eyes. In order to stay happy, in order to stay sane, we must put these things aside for some time, push them to the back of our minds so we can continue on with our day. What if, while we are sleeping, these feelings, these thoughts, make their way back into the front of our minds. And, when we awake, we are met with them for a reason. It makes me think. If our minds are powerful enough to bring these thoughts into our consciousness while we are asleep, then our minds must be powerful enough to think of ways to fix them as well.

There is some sort of hope, some sort of happiness, in the idea that while we may wake with this sadness, it means never the less that we are still awake, and still alive, and still feeling. And, with every day that we awake once again, we have a chance to make ourselves, and the ones around us, happy. And in the end, if it takes a morning of sadness for us to realize how happy we actually can be, I will take it. Because the truth is, I would rather help to make the ones around me happy than to just be happy alone.