Today’s been one of those days so far.

A Monday after a rare cold and snowy weekend in Albuquerque, I thought I felt rested and fired up for a good work day today. I knew I was coming to work with a few clear items I needed to hammer out- and I thought I would be ready for it. But things just haven’t gone that way.

I guess I should have known something was off when I went to feed the cats and passing the litter box saw one of them was unhappy with me and had taken a crap on the carpet near it. You derelict, he (I suspect) was telling me.

I still felt pretty good coming in to work, but once I started looking at the most pressing item on my list, reviewing the involved scripts and data in the database tables, it devolved quickly into an undiagnosable, unsolvable data recovery problem from the app’s database- and what I thought would be a 20 minute script fix has rolled out into a four-hours-and-counting rage-provoking problem. The expletives have bubbled up under my breath for two hours now, and I just had to leave for lunch. The problem exists based on the way data WENT INTO the table in the first place, which means a handful of scripts also need to be updated to stop the data issue from expanding through later data entries- which are all the while still being made into this app at present by our client.

These are the kind of days that make me stop and question the quality of my work and my capabilities as a developer. It’s one of those days that I feel like I couldn’t find my way out of a sleeping bag if I had to, and one of those days that anger fills me like a flash flood for seemingly trivial reasons. And largely, one of those days where my behaviors signal, to me, that love is far away. My disposition to love, that is.

—

I spoke to a friend this morning, and she said that some kind, unrevealed stranger in her neighborhood cleared the snow off of her car and rolled her trash bins down the snow-covered driveway of her house to the curb on the street for collection. Her disclosure of that kind little act is important right now as I think about the posture of my heart this morning.

Little acts of kindness go a long way in this world to allow you to say, or to allow you to feel, that “You are loved.” A cleared off car. A bag of coffee given to a friend. Even just a kind word, recognizing a nice shirt someone is wearing, or recognizing a change in the sweep of their hair or that new pair of shoes. Or just a thank you for a held-open door. So many ways to say “You matter.”

—

The restaurant I came to now for lunch is freezing, and when I first got here, the employee- a 24 year old girl- engaged me to chat after making my meal. There was no one else here, and it was cold, and she was bored. “It’s freezing in here”, I observed. “Yeah- I was trying to get a friend of mine to bring me a hot chocolate” she told me before volunteering a little more about her life.

I think she was just happy to talk a little. She helped me to forget my work near-meltdown.

Some days, we need a little extra bit of attention to help us along, to help us climb over a hurt or hang up. And some days, we need to give a little bit to reconnect with the love we already know.

—

Excuse me- I think I need to go find her a cup of hot chocolate.