When in need of perking up, some folks go boating, some play air hockey, others listen to loud music. List four things you do.
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Now that that's cleared up, what are the four things that I would do if I were down and needed to snap out of it?
Bookstore... I would go to the nearest Barnes & Noble and lose myself in the books. Fiction, cooking, writing, magazines... The reasons for why I'm down might guide my selection, but in general, just being in the bookstore itself is often enough. It's the endless possibilities, the sense that there's an almost infinite amount of knowledge right in front of me and available for the taking. New books, new worlds, new hobbies, new interests. A bookstore for me stands for all of that and that's where I would go as one of my places.
Office supplies... If I don't have time for a bookstore, I would go to an office supply store. Office Depot, Staples, one of those. Office supplies are my therapy. I don't even need to buy anything, just wandering around the store and looking at all the shiny notebooks, pens, folders, sticky notes is enough to settle my mind and bring a sense of peace. I don't go near the electronics, just the tactile supplies, the things that I never had growing up or at least not in this dizzying variety of colors and styles. I can spend twenty minutes slowly wandering through an office supply store and leave it feeling ready to face the world again.
My kitchen... If I can, I'll cook to clear my mind and get away from whatever is bothering me. I love cooking. Not baking. I don't bake. Baking requires too many rules and my life has enough rules and regulations in it already. I love cooking because once you have some sense of how ingredients will behave, you can experiment in just about any direction you want. Cooking consumes me leaving no room for anything else. I can have the TV or radio on in the background but it's just noise. When I am cooking, my entire world is reduced to the ingredients in front of me. The results of what I make are almost irrelevant. What matters is that for the minutes or hours that I spend in the kitchen I feel like I'm in full control of my life.
Meditation... I don't meditate in the more conventional sense of the word; it's more like self-hypnosis. This is my last resort and I will employ it before I go to sleep. If I've had a horrible day and I cannot shut my brain off in the usual ways, I'll go through the steps of my self-hypnosis. I imagine a long hallway with many open doors on both sides and a single closed door straight ahead. I walk down the hallway and imagine each door closing as I pass it, secreting behind it part of my bad day - work, personal issues, anything - so that by the time I reach the end of the hallway and am standing in front of the final door, everything that I've been carrying around with me all day is gone; safely away behind all the doors that are now behind me. The final door leads to a sanctuary and each time I do this I get to decide what I want the sanctuary to look like. Some days it's a small private library, other days it's a luxurious bathroom with a tub, still others it might be a bedroom. Whatever works for a given evening, I will draw it in my mind to the smallest detail and once I enter it, I can feel myself physically unclench and usually I am already drifting off to sleep as my mind finishes putting the final touches on the sanctuary of my dreams.
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