How to survive a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day
My mornings can unfold like the evolution of man. I rise from bed, cerebral synapses barely firing, shambling forth like a Cro-magnon wandering across some long-ago savannah.
Hopefully, there will be progress as the minutes and hours pass. In the morning haze, though, I can miss things.
As was the case the other day, when I opened the fridge for milk for coffee and noticed that the container was warm to the touch.
At that moment, I realized that the inside of the fridge was about the same temperature as the interior of our house.
The ancient oaths, they did flow. Before the cursing gathered real momentum, I noticed the dog at the back door, looking back over his shoulder, signaling that it was time for his morning ritual.
I reached for the doorknob, then stopped.
Outside, through a sheet of rain, I could see that a section of fence that had already blown down twice this winter, was horizontal once again. If the hound, who possesses the speed and elusiveness of a young Bobby Orr, was unleashed back there, that would be the last I would see of him.
MORE MISFORTUNE
Have I mentioned that moments before, when I had turned on the sink faucet to run water into the kettle, the nozzle had fallen off?
Or that the small forearm gash that I suffered trying to reboot the sump pump when it failed during last week’s rains had somehow started to bleed again?
That the beginning of my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day — sorry Judith Vorst — had been made worse because of a throbbing tooth, cause unknown, that had caused a fitful night of sleep.
And that the pain, along with my bleary-eyed state, compounded by a cruel lack of the caffeine that I need to jump-start the brain waves, meant that I had no idea what to write about in this space?
The latter is nothing new to me. Neither is having a hard start to the day, which is part of being human.
Merely walking the earth is more stressful than it has been for a long time, Michael Ungar, the founder and director of Dalhousie University’s Resilience Research Centre, said when I called him.
That’s because of all the anxiety-inducing things that are going on in the world, and the way that the media and social media make it hard for us to escape from it all.
But also, he says because “everything has just gotten progressively more complicated in our (everyday) lives.”
Ungar, as his title implies, is an expert on resilience, which is generally thought to mean how we bounce back from adversity, rebound from setbacks and become stronger because bad things have happened.
‘MORE THAN JUST SIMPLE GRIT’
But he says resilience “is more than just simple grit” and is instead, a “more complicated and nuanced process … involving factors inside and out … that protects a person from stress.”
Talking about resilience, then, in the context of my piddly inconveniences seemed not just craven, but kind of crazy.
Resilience, the way he sees it, is something my grandfather developed to deal with going into the coal mines at 11 and then fighting with the Canadian side in most of the big battles in the Second World War — or a process that allowed my father to be institutionalized for two years with tuberculosis as a young man and still go on to be the first Demont to attend university, where even with his compromised lungs he was a lettered athlete.
It isn’t stoically going, virtually, to work with a toothache or fretting about the possibility of having to drop some dough on a fridge.
That, it is good to remember, is just getting on with a bad day.
I went online for wise counsel on how to navigate mine: I would have been embarrassed, given my meagre list of complaints, to reach out to a supportive friend, as many “resilience experts” counselled.
A walk seemed a more appropriate response to my woes. So, I took one and it did. I also heeded the advice of a Tiktoker with an Irish accent who said to sit down, lean back and tilt your eyes slightly backwards “and you will instantly feel relief and calmness,” which did some of what he claimed would be the result.
On the other hand, listening to an upbeat song, said to be a sure-fire way to brighten things, didn’t do much for my mood. That was perhaps because I chose Van Morrison’s bouncy tune There Will Be Days Like This.
In my glum state of mind, the song’s sunny optimism was undercut by the Belfast Cowboy’s reputation for orneriness, which made me wonder if I had not understood that the piece was meant to be ironic.
SOLDIERING ON
Since I do not pray to a deity, there was no asking for divine intervention. The only option seemed to be just soldiering on with the day, as sooner or later we must do.
I snagged an appointment with my dentist, which was good news. He told me I had an infected tooth and would therefore need a root canal, which was NOT good — but was at least better than needing to have the inflamed incisor hauled out altogether.
The day’s appointment, huzzah, was fully covered by my wife’s dental plan, enough of a win to allow me to forget for the moment about the time in the dentist’s chair to come.
A tech guy showed up, when he said he would, to see what was wrong with the fridge. An hour later he announced that a new part was needed that would take a couple of days to arrive; we would have to make arrangements in the meantime to keep the grub cool and ensure a bad piece of fish didn’t take us away.
In my suddenly positive frame of mind, I chose to view that as a win too.
Gathering steam, I muscled up the downed fence section, and used a ceramic planter to anchor it in place, an arrangement that, I felt, should work until my daughter and her pro carpenter boyfriend make good on their promise of a permanent solution.
Then I went back inside, fired up the Mokka pot and steamed some milk that was still cool from the grocery store’s refrigerator. I sat down, took a sip, said “ahh” and started to write this column.