Dried green paint (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

a can of paint

It’s amazing how painting a room can brighten our day. A dear friend of mine just repainted her kitchen. I did the edging and the trim because, frankly, she does a terrible job. :). She chose a wonderful yellow-green color. I’m encouraging her to paint her two interior doors in the kitchen white. The doors are just those ugly hollow core doors with no impressive trim so there’s no reason to leave them as they are. She’s being stubborn.

When she began this project I encouraged her to fill in all the nail holes so she wouldn’t automatically put everything back in the same place. Which brings me to the subject of this post.

Sometimes all it takes to jump-start our mood is to change something-anything. Move a picture. Paint a small piece of furniture, a knickknack, whatever. Or, like my friend, paint an entire room.  Just going through all the paint chips is mood-lightening- thumbing through all those beautiful colors. I love it.

As you know, we’ve been redecorating each room of our room for this past year. Sometimes it’s been a big “re-do”, like replacing ceilings and walls. Other times, it’s been new floors.  Come to think of it, no room as just had a touch-up.  No wonder we’re getting tired.  We have two rooms left that we’ll tackle next year and a couple of little rooms that I can’t give a name to because they serve no primary function. (Remember, our home is over one hundred years old so there are lots of issue.  And I thought I had issues.)

I haven’t mentioned depression for a while so where does it fit in this post?

Just that sometimes something small, like looking at paint chips, can help.  Depression is big, but the steps to recovery are usually small, very small. That’s because by the time we realize we’re depressed, all those little things that have piled up have already snowballed into one big problem. So now we have to backtrack, one small step at a time.

Whether you’re dealing with depression now or not, if you get a chance in the next few days, go get some paint chips. Color is always good if you’re experiencing some grey days.

God bless.