There are days – especially this time of year – when life seems so overwhelming that just the thought of getting out of bed is enough to keep you there. It’s those moments as you lie there, staring at the ceiling or at your sleeping mate, when it’s important to choose your attitude for the day: will you decide to start the day fresh, to tackle your obstacles with cheer, or will you haul the anxieties, worry and stress from the day before out of bed with you, allowing them to weigh you down through your day?
To be whole and happy, to not plow through your life but live inside each moment, it is vital to allow light and love into your life. Look for the good, even when all else is bleak. Take your moments and turn them over in your hand like a shell, a jewel, and treat each new day as a joyful adventure.
Leslie LaChance wrote this poem from a prompt referencing a Lucille Clifton poem, with the Lucille Clifton Collective, a group of women writers in Nashville.
Each Morning
“each morning i pull myself/ out of despair” –Lucille Clifton, The Book of Light
for no reason except that I can. Today, for instance, I woke up, as they say,
clothed in my own good mind, no small feat or modest blessing, given the ways of this planet.
And on my way to work, I saw my neighbor coming home from his, dirty, exhausted, and he smiled at me.
At work, the mean boss was out sick, and the second boss bought everyone lunch.
At the grocery, they were out of the bread I like and 2% milk, so I bought donuts and mango juice.
And the dogs didn’t care that I’m no millionaire — they wagged and kissed and kissed and wagged.
Even when night showed up wearing lonely, a sliver of moon set itself on my windowsill, company.
Leslie LaChance grew up in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York and now makes her home in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in literary journals, including Mead, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Juked. Her collection, How She Got That Way, was published in the chapbook quartet Mend&Hone, from Toadlily press in 2013. She edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration and teaches writing at a small university.
Photo credit: 
Morning Glory by Rachel Kramer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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