A Curious Thing About Good Days
Coming to Love Your Life After a Big Move
Before you retired, or took on a life of creative pursuits, or moved to a new country, chances are, your good days were … well-behaved. You knew you were having a good day when you had a sense of purpose, a focus, and there was flow. The day had a welcome rhythm to it, there was comfort in people around you saying Hello, and there was a soothing familiarity to how systems worked. You knew what you were doing, you felt useful and competent. You cherished feeling seen, acknowledged, impressive.
Bad days, by contrast, had always been … a bit rude. They had a mind of their own, they would throw you off, they would make it impossible for you to be productive and happy with yourself. When you were having a bad day, your boss noticed, your partner noticed, and the kids noticed, all of it making the day even more miserable. You may have found comfort in naming the culprit: A useless meeting that went on for too long. A stupid new project. Someone too eager about something, or not enough.
If your employers were anything like mine, you would be surrounded by frameworks and coaches to help you notice how you respond under pressure, why too much ambiguity or pointless change does not bring you joy, how being trusted to make a system better turns you on. You got to know your strengths and your style, and you knew how to keep most of your days on your side. You got the hang of yourself.
And then you made a big, exciting move — and your days stopped behaving. You may not have noticed it right away, caught up in the excitement and adventure of relocating, meeting new people, and figuring things out. Yet somehow, your days in the new place have grown different from the good old days “back home”. It hits you that days are no longer as easy as they once were to classify as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
Across borders, days get mischievous. They refuse to follow the familiar rules. They don’t care how capable you think you are, or what your accomplishments used to be. These days are deeply unimpressed by your proficiency or fluency, in anything at all. They trip you up over every little thing: A form to fill out that is not making any sense. A website that was and now isn’t. A sentence that comes out backwards. A perfectly innocent interaction that leaves you feeling like it’s your first day riding a bicycle.
When a good day eventually comes, you are delighted and astonished. You notice it quickly: It’s when all goes beautifully well. The clerk just takes your form and nods. Your new login and password are accepted. You don’t feel foolish, or at least not before lunch. Don’t such days feel wonderful? It’s like when the warm sun comes out after a storm, the air is fresh, and the world is suddenly, curiously at peace with itself.
The unexpected side effect of moving is that getting to enjoy good days can actually take effort. Effort where things used to be simple and seamless and sort of self-driving. Effort where you want to feel carefree and joyful … If your happiness and sense of well-being depend on things going smoothly, you may catch yourself thinking that you are not doing all that well at this whole living abroad business — are you?!
But then, of course — if you’re paying attention — a new kind of good day shows up. It’s not perfect or polished. It may start with something going silly. It may give you a reason or two to sigh. But it leaves you with a sense of tiny forward movement: The right word came to mind. You figured out a new system. Maybe you embarrassed yourself, yet you made a friend in the process. You didn’t give up, use bad words, or run away when it was rather tempting to do so. That’s got to count as a good day!
Surely more not-so-good days are yet to come, they creep up quietly: A sequence of tiny confusions. A sense that everything requires way too much effort. Or a wondering whether the move was a good idea at all. Yet, what if the main thing that makes these ‘bad’ days so is the story we tell ourselves about them? That we should be fluent in the new language by now, that getting a parcel through customs ought not be so painful, that surely someone is changing the rules on us on purpose … Is this all just a test!?
When a day like that hits you, what do you do? Scream? Slam the door? Close yourself in? Eat a bag of cookies?
If you were to pause for a moment and think of comforts that proved helpful in the past, you might choose to make your favourite meal. Or go for a long walk with no destination. Or listen to a playlist that knows who you were before all this. When you let go of the idea that the world is conspiring against you, and reach for what’s familiar and comforting, you can keep yourself from turning into a grumpy, brittle version of yourself. Let the world’s silliness become just the silliness you laugh about.
The ultimate reward comes when over time, you stop demanding that days prove their worth by being easy, tame, without surprises. You start noticing when a day wants to be a friend, when it helps you become a little more at home in your own skin. No doubt you still cherish the effortlessly good-to-you days when they show up, but you no longer insist on all your days being that way. You watch each day unfold as it may.
Relocation, it turns out, is not always interested in making you comfortable. It makes you work for it, and keeps you on alert. But that just means you notice more, ponder more deeply, and make peace with how the world is now. Each new day invites you to pay attention, and grow a bit through the experience. And if you let it, the day may teach you to admire how good life is, including in places you never thought to look.