Chapter Twenty-Three: Those Winter Mornings (~jinghan)

When you’ve had a day that started with a stressful driving experience where your supervising parental yells at you for making driving mistakes leading to your being distracted by their yelling leading to your making more driving mistakes leading to their yelling more…

When you’ve had a day that ended with you realising that you didn’t get as much work done as you had planned…

Well it wasn’t a great day and left me a little bit moody. The sort where you don’t really know why you are moody and so you start conjuring up everything “bad” that has happened to you in the last three weeks and instead of solving the mystery of why you were moody you end up fuelling the moodiness. And really deep down you know the reason is just that you’ve had a bad day and you are tired and sleeping and waking up again usually solves everything – but now that you’ve fuelled the moodiness you can’t sleep and you are angry at yourself for not being able to sleep.

…

I wake up to a new text message:

“Hey, sorry I wasn’t able to reply to your text last night. It’s okay to be sad for no particular reason sometimes. I hope you are feeling better this bright beautiful winter morning.”

I peak out my window. Hm… it does look rather cheery out there. But I’m not in a mood to get out of bed. Just the act of putting my big toe out from under the covers is enough to confirm my decision not to exchange my warm snuggly bed for the cold cold day.

Now, here is a word of  advice about what you should do on these cold cold winter mornings:

  1. Get up and get dress and splash cold water on your face. This may seem like a contrary move, but once your face has realised how cold real cold is the morning air will feel just perfectly comfortable.
  2. Eat and drink something hot. Toast with vegemite and tea is my current morning choice. I never feel as grumbly after breakfast. Other good ideas include making scrambled eggs in the microwave, hot milk on wheatbix with honey and cinnamon, hot oats, slightly warmed cake… mm…
  3. Don a trench coat and go for a walk. This may also seem like contrary advice. But once you’ve felt the sunlight in your eyes, galloped down the street to some song on 100.3 Nova,  flirted with someone’s cat while listening to Mozart on 3NBS and danced around the gazebo to Mahler you will not feel cold anymore. I promise.

“You were right, it is a beautiful morning. I went for a walk and I’m warm and happy now.”