Thank God For Another Day — Everyday Life Observations

I almost didn’t get out of bed that morning, and I had no idea that the day I nearly skipped would be the one that changed everything I thought I knew about being alive.

The alarm went off at six forty-three. Not six forty-five, because I’d read somewhere that round numbers make it easier to hit snooze, so I’d set it three minutes early like that would somehow make me a different kind of person. It didn’t. I hit snooze twice. Maybe three times. The room was dark, that particular dark that happens in the hour before winter light finally decides to show up, and the duvet was the heaviest it had ever been. Not physically. You know the kind I mean.

I’d been going through something. I won’t dress it up. Depression is a strange word because it sounds clinical and distant when the actual experience of it is the most intimate, suffocating thing you can imagine. It’s not sadness, not really, or not only sadness. It’s more like someone turned the sound down on everything. Colours stop being colours. Food stops tasting like much. People talk to you and you’re nodding but you’re watching it all from somewhere slightly outside your own body, wondering when you’ll feel like coming back in.

That morning I lay there for forty minutes after the alarm. I counted the cracks in the ceiling. There were seven main ones and one that split into two near the light fitting. I’d counted them before. I knew them. I lay there thinking about whether I was going to call in sick to work again, which would be the third time that month, and whether my manager had already started putting together her case for why I wasn’t really working out. I lay there thinking about my mum, who was three hours away by train and who’d rung the night before and left a voicemail I hadn’t listened to yet. I lay there thinking about all the things I hadn’t done and all the things I probably wouldn’t do, and the ceiling cracks sat there above me being entirely unbothered.

I got up because I needed a glass of water. That’s it. That’s the whole reason. I was thirsty.

I shuffled into the kitchen in the oversized university hoodie I’d been living in for the better part of two weeks, filled a glass from the tap, and stood at the kitchen window whilst I drank it. The window looks out onto the small side street next to the building. Nothing interesting has ever happened on that street, as far as I know. A skip that was there for about three months. A cat that sits on the wall sometimes. On this particular morning, there was a man.

He looked about seventy, maybe older. Small frame, good coat, the kind of cap my grandfather used to wear. He was standing next to a lamp post with his head tilted back, and I thought for a moment that he’d fallen ill or was confused, and I almost put the glass down to go out and check on him. Then I realised he was looking at the sky. Just standing there, in the cold, at seven in the morning, with his face turned up at the sky.

I watched him for longer than I should have, probably. Long enough to feel slightly intrusive about it. But I couldn’t stop. He wasn’t praying, or at least he didn’t have his hands together or anything like that. He was just looking. Really looking. The way you look at something you’ve been missing for a long time and have only just found again. After a few minutes he lowered his head, straightened his cap, and walked on down the street. He didn’t look back.

I stood at that window for a long time after he’d gone.

I don’t know why it got to me the way it did. The rational part of my brain, the part that had a media studies degree and too many opinions about things it didn’t understand, wanted to explain it away. He was probably just checking the weather. Probably just a habit. Probably nothing. But there was another part of me, somewhere quieter and further down, that knew I was watching a man who understood something I’d forgotten.

That he was still here. And that it was worth a moment to notice.

I listened to my mum’s voicemail that morning. She said she’d made a chicken stew and was saving me some in the freezer. She said she’d seen a documentary about elephants she thought I’d enjoy. She said she loved me and to ring her when I got a chance. It was three minutes and twelve seconds long and she didn’t say anything important, not by the standards of important things, and I stood in the kitchen in my hoodie and cried for about twenty minutes straight.

Good crying, I think. The kind that’s been waiting.

I called her back. She answered on the second ring like she always does, like she’d been waiting, which she probably had. We talked for an hour and a half. I told her I hadn’t been great. She didn’t panic or catastrophise, which is what I’d been afraid of, which is why I hadn’t told her. She just said, “I know, love. I’ve been worried.” And somehow that was the most comforting thing anyone had said to me in months. That she knew. That I didn’t have to explain it from the beginning.

After I hung up I showered for the first time in four days. I ate actual breakfast. I opened the curtains in the sitting room, which I hadn’t done in about a fortnight, and the light came in like it was apologising for being late.

I didn’t go to work that day. But I didn’t call in sick either. I rang my manager and asked if we could have a conversation, and she was better about it than I’d expected, and we arranged to speak properly the following week. I didn’t fix anything that day. I want to be clear about that. Depression doesn’t get sorted in a morning because an old man looked at the sky and made you cry into your water glass. It doesn’t work like that. But something shifted. Something that had been completely still for a long time moved a little.

The weeks that followed were slow. I made a GP appointment, which I’d been putting off, and the waiting list was long, which is always the way, but being on it felt different to not being on it. I started ringing my mum more. Not every day, because that felt like pressure, but most days. I started going outside more deliberately. Not for any particular reason, not to exercise or run errands, just to be outside. To be somewhere that wasn’t my flat and my ceiling cracks.

I thought about the old man a lot. I wondered about his life, the way you wonder about strangers you’ve glimpsed for thirty seconds and will never see again. I wondered what had happened to him that made him stand in the cold and look up at the sky like it was something worth being grateful for. I wondered if he’d lost someone. I wondered if he’d been ill. Or maybe nothing had happened to him at all. Maybe he was just a person who’d worked out something the rest of us keep forgetting.

That it’s enough, sometimes. Just to be here. Just to have made it to another morning.

I see it differently now, the ordinary stuff. The alarm going off. The light coming in. The kettle boiling. The voicemail from your mum about a chicken stew and an elephant documentary. None of it is remarkable, I know that. None of it would make a list of the great events of a life. But I was so far inside myself for those months that I’d stopped seeing any of it at all, and there is a particular kind of grief that comes with that. Not dramatic grief. The quiet kind. The kind where you’ve stopped participating in your own life without even fully noticing it’s happened.

I still have hard days. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. There are mornings where the duvet wins. There are afternoons where the sound goes down again and everything feels like it’s happening slightly further away than it should. But there’s something different now. A sort of awareness underneath it, even on the worst days. A small, stubborn thing that knows I’ve been here before and I came out the other side and there was a chicken stew waiting in the freezer and light coming in through curtains I eventually remembered to open.

I went back to that window a lot, those first few weeks. Half hoping, I suppose, that I’d see him again. The man with the good coat and the grandfather’s cap. I never did. But I kept looking out at that patch of grey street and grey sky, and one morning, I don’t know exactly when, I realised I’d started tilting my head up a bit too. Not all the way. Not the way he had. But enough.

Enough to notice it was still there. The sky. The morning. Another day.

My mum came to visit in February. She brought the chicken stew, frozen solid in a Tupperware she’d had since the nineties, and we watched the elephant documentary together on my sofa. It was about a herd in Kenya and the way they mourn their dead, and we both cried, though neither of us mentioned it, and it was one of the nicest evenings I’d had in a long time.

I thought about writing this for a while before I did. I wasn’t sure there was a story in it, really. An old man. A kitchen window. A voicemail. A GP appointment. Nothing happened, technically. Nobody wronged me. Nobody came through for me in some grand dramatic way. There was no revelation, no single moment where everything became clear and the music swelled and I understood the meaning of it all.

Just the slow, ordinary work of deciding to show up. To open the curtains. To pick up the phone. To tilt your head up at the sky for a moment before walking on.

Thank God for another day. I mean that properly. Not as a phrase. Not as a thing you type under a sunrise photo. I mean the actual weight of it. The fact that you woke up. That the kettle’s still working. That someone somewhere has saved you a bowl of something in the freezer, and they’ll answer on the second ring, and they’ve been worried, and you don’t have to explain it from the beginning because they already know.

That’s enough. Some days that’s everything.

I counted the ceiling cracks this morning. Force of habit, I suppose. Seven main ones, and one that splits into two near the light fitting. But I got up after. Opened the curtains. Made some tea.

The sky was doing something nice with the light.

I didn’t change my life that morning. I just stopped pretending it wasn’t mine.

💬 What’s one small thing that reminded you recently that being alive is worth something? Tell me in the comments.

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