Over the last year while writing my daily blogs, I have often used a specific track on the Insight Timer app to get me in “writing mode.” Sometime during the year, the app introduced a “daily check-in” feature where they ask to choose my current mood. The options are Great, Good, Okay, Bad and Awful.
I have selected “Okay” 99% of the time.
The first 10 times that I selected “Okay”, I didn’t think anything of it. But as I continued to select it, it started concerning me.
I was usually logging into the app before writing, something I love to do. Was something wrong with me because I was choosing Okay all the time? Shouldn’t I be feeling Great or at the very least Good if I was just about to start writing? Shouldn’t I be grateful to be doing something I love?
As I continued to select “Okay” over several months, I became okay with being okay because it was true! I toyed with the idea of choosing Good to see if I could trick myself into upping my mood.
But really, “Okay” was the most accurate way to describe how life was going. In our house, we had a bunch of tough stuff happen in 2021. And while I have really enjoyed my creative work, it wasn’t enough to override all of the other emotions happening in my body.
There is probably a way to trick the mind into upleveling my mood but I was not so interested in that. I didn’t want to pretend to be good or great. And I don’t think that being okay is a bad thing. It doesn’t mean that I am not enjoying or appreciating life.
How we feel is separate from how thankful we are.
And having that tension between the two is okay.
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