Heroes Not Zombies

What does your perfect day look like?

“Perfect” – there’s the problem right there……just what is “perfect”? Hard to say, really, but I’m pretty sure it always means something better. Better than what? Better than what is?

There’s something unreal about perfectionism, isn’t there? Something unachievable. It’s always just out of reach (or sometimes it seems way out of reach!)

I like blue skies.

I like beautiful rosy pink dawns and tobacco or scarlet sunsets.

This photo is of none of those things – no blue, no pink, no sepia hues, no deep crimson reds. It’s grey. Grey and dark greens shading into black and that one bright, bright white circle in the sky…..the Sun, struggling to make itself known, veiled in mist and cloud.

But it’s beautiful, don’t you think?

When I stepped outside I could hear the mist. Well, what I mean by that is I could hear what the world sounds like around here when there is a thick morning mist hiding the vineyards and the neighbouring villages. Like snow, the mist is a muffler. It produces a particular kind of silence. I can’t quite put my finger on it and define just how the misty silence differs from the silence of a bright sunny Sunday morning here in the Charente. The Sunday morning silences are recognisable too. If I didn’t know what day of the week it was, I reckon I’d be able to tell from the particular quality of the silence around here on a Sunday morning. But this silence, this autumnal misty silence, is different from that. Maybe it’s because the mist disguises the sounds, whereas on Sunday mornings, there just aren’t the sounds to be disguised?

So I look up and I see where the Sun is. I can’t see the Sun. It’s not distinct, but I absolutely know where it is….strongly filtered through the watery veil lying thickly on the ground. And I think “How beautiful” “What a moment!” To stand here, looking in every direction and seeing only a shallow foreground of grass, trees and bushes, but knowing, from memory, what lies beyond them. To stand here, in silence, listening. To stand here, in silence, knowing that the Sun up there is probably going to make most of this water evaporate and reveal itself in all its fiery glory again, maybe in an hour or so, maybe a little longer.

Unexpectedly, I think “How perfect”.

I don’t know what makes a day a perfect day, but maybe it’s any day when I become fully aware, fully present in this moment and this place.

Maybe a perfect day isn’t an unachievable, unreachable, figment of the imagination, but a day with a moment, or several moments, where I feel it’s just so good to be alive, where I find myself saying “thank you”.

“Thank you, I feel blessed to be alive”.