Little lists are insurance against blues

You know how it is when you're feeling good.

A piece of your brain gets all cocky and starts thinking that maybe THIS time you'll just keep right on feeling good.

Forever!

From here on out, baby, it'll just be sunshine and lollipops.

Then one day you feel the blues bite like a cold wind picking up in the alley behind your house.

And boom.

It's Blue Déja Vu all over again.

Sometimes the blues hit because you're just wired that way.

They come and go, come and go without much rhyme or reason.

Other times you turn all blue because you've lost something — a friend moves, a job doesn't materialize, a dream dies.

Go ahead. It's your turn now. Feel free to fill in the blank, because we've all been there.

Lately I've been rereading a book called "What Happy People Know: How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Life for the Better," by Dan Baker, Ph.D.

And yes.

I know.

Only in America would we turn the pursuit of happiness into an academic discipline.

SO first-world of us. Go Team USA!

Still.

I admire this book a lot because of quotations like the following:

"I realized that there was something happy people know that unhappy people don't; no matter what happens in life, there's always something left to love, and the love that remains is always stronger than anything that goes against it."

Every morning as I run I compose lists of the little things I love.

A clean, hard hit on a football field — (real grass btw, not Astroturf). Old rose shrubs loaded with bright red hips. Cold (not diet!) Dr. Pepper in a can. Any mystery by M.C. Beaton featuring Hamish Macbeth. Dogs.

Baby fingers wrapped around one of mine. The scent of white phlox on a hot day. My kids laughing in the next room. Fresh peaches, fresh cherries, fresh tomatoes. Orchards. The east mountains at twilight.