On gray days

Julia ♦ January 16, 2024 ♦ 2 Comments

Photo by Thought Catalog via Unsplash

“On gray days, when it’s snowing or raining, I think you should be able to call up a judge and take an oath that you’ll just read a good book all day, and he’d allow you to stay home.” ― Bill Watterson

In the winter it’s so easy to become gloomy and depressed. Not surprisingly, I’ve had an especially tough time with that this winter. Take tonight, when I was feeling very morose and sad, cold and lonely. I started feeding my brain images of cozy winter scenes, with fireplaces and books and warm mugs of tea or hot chocolate. Bingo! Just like that, I felt better. I suppose it was a real-life demonstration of the song “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music.

So if you live in the northern hemisphere where it’s likely to be cold right now, I invite you to take a quick mental vacation. I hereby appoint myself the judge Watterson imagined. As far as I’m concerned, you may stay home and read a good book all day. Objections? Overruled.

Okay, so maybe you do have to work, or run errands, or do any of a number of other things you can’t gracefully avoid. Just do what I did tonight, and pretend: imagine a cozy scene with a favorite book. Throw in other fun ideas such as a fireplace, freshly-baked cookies or a savory quiche, or a long chat with a good friend who’s reading the same book you are. If you are like me, these thoughts will cheer you up, even if you’re only daydreaming for a minute or two.

Then promise yourself to set aside at least an hour tonight to bring the daydream to life.

This post was first published seven years ago today. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.