There are so many reasons. The holidays. Monthly female stuff. The cold, cold temperatures (I'm starting to think there is really something to this seasonal affective disorder). Work stress. General malaise.

Yesterday was one of those days that I just wanted to power through. I literally didn't talk for most of the evening because I couldn't bear to hear anything I had to say. I spent most of the day wishing it was over.

Isn't that a terrible feeling? It's the absolute opposite of feeling grateful. Which only made me feel worse about myself.

I used to have a lot of days like this. Days spent feeling sorry for myself. Days spent wishing for things I didn't have. Days in which I was unable to see the goodness right in front of me.

I'm thankful that I don't feel that way very often anymore. Days like yesterday are rare for me. I do think it's hard to feel grateful ALL the time though. And I think it's important to honor the lows now and then. Without lows, we wouldn't have such glorious highs, would we?

I wonder if the lower we experience life, the higher we are also able to experience it?

I think that was true for my father. And yesterday, in my dark mood, I thought a lot about him.

 It was 66 years ago today that my father was shot down during WWII. December 17, 1944. I've written about this many times and you can read the full story here, but the gist is that my father was a pilot during WWII and he was shot down in the air of the Czech Republic and taken to a POW camp in Germany for the last six months of the war. He survived extreme conditions, severe cold and starvation, dismal living conditions and mistreatment by the German soldiers. He even ate a dead horse at one point (always my favorite part of the story when I was a kid).

He stole the below photo, along with his records when the Germans abandoned the prison camp, upon learning that they had lost the war.

My father was 24 years old when this happened, and when the war ended six months later he returned home to Michigan. He had married a woman just before he left for the war and he went home to her and to a son he hadn't even met yet.

He also returned home a changed man. A grateful man.

If there were days in my father's life when he felt depressed, I never knew about it. The man I knew was always strong, always positive, and always grateful for where he found himself. He could find pleasure in the simplest things, the company of a friend, enough ice cubes in his glass, a good movie on TV, the warmth of a spring day.

He was calm and patient and gentle, and generally happy. My father never rushed anywhere. He never got overwhelmed or stressed out. Sometimes my mother and I could exasperate him, but any tension he ever felt seemed to disappear quickly like a passing rain storm.

If I was in 7th grade right now and writing an essay about who my role model is, I would definitely say it was my father. I think about him all the time. I measure myself to the man he was, and I take inspiration from his approach to life.

I believe that life is all about the choices we make. That we can choose to be miserable or happy. That we can choose to be fearful or brave.That we can make the choice to live a life we are proud of.

My father taught me this.

Today I remember my father, and the other brave men who fought with him all those years ago.

I’m not really sure why. Last night I finally tried to put words to whatever it is I’ve been feeling. I sat on the deck with Greg at dusk, the cicadas ringing in the trees and little drifts of fallen golden leaves all around us on the wood.

Tears dripped down onto my shirt and I stared out through the branches at the river swirling by.

I can’t quite put my finger on it. Something is amiss. Would it be wrong to say that I’m not happy? Is it impossible to feel that I still don’t have roots here, in my life in Chicago? That I miss California, but no longer feel like that place is home either? Is it possible, in the midst of all the good things in my life, I’m still not satisfied?

In one of the many articles I read following David Foster Wallace’s death, I distinctly remember a quoted passage in which he spoke of his depression. He wondered if it was an American thing, this not feeling satisfied even when things are better than they’ve ever been.

Still, a lingering quiet dullness permeates my days. There are bright moments, flashes of fulfillment, of peace, but overall, a drifting cloud.

I’ll try to be patient with myself. To keep walking. To hold still in those bright moments. To recognize the cloud for what it is, to not pretend it isn’t there. To remember that life, if nothing else, is always moving forward.

I tried meditation for the first time last year, and for a while I was going to private sessions with a wonderful instructor at LA Dharma in Westwood. The experience I had in the couple of months that I was practicing was profound. I had no idea that there could even be space between the constant stream of thoughts in my head.

You would think that since it was so profound I would have been working away at regular meditation, but all I’ve really done is read about it. And I’ve loved reading about it and it always sounds so good in the books. Wow, I’m always thinking, I really need to get back into this. And then I never do. I just keep reading about it.

Needless to say, it felt really good to actually meditate in class last night. Walking home I thought about how far I’ve come in the last couple of years. It’s been just over two years now since I began doing yoga and, pretty early on into my practice, I went on a retreat to a place called Casa Barranca in Ojai. Looking back at this time in my life, I can hardly remember what was driving me to do these things — they were all experiences that I’d been resistant to for years. I think I’d simply become desperate in my attempts to change the way I was feeling about life and was willing to try anything, even yoga.

Anyway, about a year and a half ago, I found myself at this retreat with a bunch of practiced yogis whom I’d never met, and as scary as it was, it felt really good. After dinner the first night I took a walk up a trail nearby and found a hammock strung between two high trees overlooking a vista and I sat for a long time. And as I sat there, looking out into the dusky night sky, listening to the trees rustling in the breeze above me and feeling the gentle sway of the hammock, I began to cry.

In one simple moment I realized how very long it had been since I had let myself sit and be. I realized how, over the previous three years since my father died, I’d become very adept at filling every single space in my life. I’d constructed my days so that not one moment remained in which I had to sit alone and be with myself. I was amazed to suddenly see it all so clearly, to recognize how and why I’d been doing this for so long.

I realized that I’d been unable to sit still because of all the sadness and the pain I carried around with me. There was so much of it that, even if I sat for just a few minutes, it would bubble up through me so quickly that I felt like I would drown if I didn’t push it back down and cover it up.

That night, at the retreat, marked the beginning of the transformation I’ve undergone in the last couple of years. After that weekend I went home and I began to work at just sitting. For months I took a bath every night so that I was forced to just sit. At first it was so hard. I cried every night. I cried over my parents and all the sickness and death I’d seen. I cried for being alone and I cried for all the things I hated about myself. I cried in fear of all the pain that just kept coming up, night after night as I sat in the bath.

But eventually, (and I wasn’t even banking on this happening) the tears started to dissipate and I realized that all these things I’d been crying about simply needed to be let out and acknowledged. That all this time that I’d been filling up my days and pushing these feelings away, they weren’t actually going away — rather, they were just waiting to be let out.

If you’re interested, you can go back and read through some of that time period. Start in January of 2007.

Anyway, I thought about this a lot last night coming home from the meditation workshop and I felt really proud for seeing myself through all that misery. We all have it, to a certain degree. And it’s really hard to sit with. Now, when I sit quietly, the only things I battle are grocery lists and article deadlines, benign little reminders that don’t carry nearly a tenth of the punch that old stuff did.

But I really believe that had I not forced myself to sit, night after night, in that bath for three months and really let go of all of that pain, I wouldn’t be where I am today. And I am so grateful for where I am.

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(On a completely unrelated subject, please feel free to read about the chili-cheese dog I ate on the 4th of July in a new post on She Wrote, He Wrote.)