Today closes Mental Health Awareness Month. For seventy-seven years now, every May has carried this small national gesture, founded by Mental Health America in 1949 as a way of bringing attention to something we tend to leave at the edge of our daily lives. This year’s theme arrived as a question rather than a slogan, and it has stayed with me all month. More Good Days, Together. What does a good day actually look like, for you and for the people you share your life with? It sounds modest. The longer I sit with it, the less modest it feels.
A borrowed definition of a good day
Most of us answer the question quickly, with whatever language is closest at hand. A good day is a productive day. A good day is one where I got through the list. A good day is a day where everything went smoothly. These answers carry a grain of truth, and they are also borrowed. They belong to the surrounding culture, to old jobs we have long since left, to parents and teachers and supervisors who once defined the terms of our worth. The real work begins the moment you stop borrowing.
James Hollis writes often about the inherited self, the version of us assembled in childhood out of the expectations and anxieties of the people around us. We carry that version forward into adulthood without ever quite noticing, until somewhere around midlife it begins to chafe. Jung described the long work of individuation as the slow process of distinguishing what is genuinely yours from what was simply absorbed. The question of what a good day looks like is a small but real instance of that work.
What a good day looks like through an integrative lens
The field I have spent my professional life inside, integrative health, holds that wellbeing belongs to many dimensions at once. A good day, in this view, includes the body, the mind, the heart, the spirit, and the relationships through which we are continually shaped. Each of these touches the others. A productive workday with a clenched jaw and a sleepless night carries the form of a good day without its substance, however many items got crossed off the list. A slower day with a long walk, a real conversation, a meal eaten without rushing, an hour of useful work, and a real night of sleep is a different category of day entirely.
Some of what I have learned about good days came as a surprise, and most of it came after I moved to Querétaro. The pace here invites a different definition. A leisurely breakfast that no one rushes you through. An afternoon walk past cantera stone walls warmed by the sun. A long conversation that wanders. Living here has been a slow rewriting of my list, and the body has been doing most of the editing.
The body knows the difference
Milton Erickson, who taught us much of what we still know about how change actually happens, used to insist that the unconscious holds far more wisdom about a person’s life than the conscious mind has yet learned to listen to. The body is usually first to notice what is true. When you imagine a good day in detail, your shoulders settle, your breath lengthens, something in you leans toward the image. When you imagine the kind of good day someone else once told you to want, the body stiffens or grows still. Pay attention to those signals. They are information itself, the data your life keeps sending in your direction.
From awareness to your own particular life
A month of awareness, however well intended, stays at the level of slogans unless awareness becomes specificity. Green ribbons and lit-up buildings are gentle reminders, and gentle reminders matter. The real work begins the moment you set the slogan down and ask yourself, in your own kitchen, on your own ordinary morning, what would actually make today a good day. The answer will be smaller than you expect and more particular than the campaigns can capture. It will sound like you.
So here is an invitation for the week now opening. Take ten minutes with a notebook and write what a good day looks like for you, in your own language and in real detail. Hour by hour, or as a list of textures, sights, conversations, foods, moments of rest and moments of useful work. Then look at the day in front of you and ask which one piece you could give yourself before the sun goes down. In A Life Aligned I describe an intention audit that lives near this practice. The aim is the same, a life that fits the actual person living it.
Mental Health Awareness Month closes today, and the question it leaves in the room stays open. More good days, together, begins with knowing what a good day actually is for you, in your particular skin, in your particular life. The closer you get to that answer, the more of those days you tend to have.
What would make today a good day for you, in your own language and in your own particular life?
With care,
Mark
Writing from home in Querétaro