Have you ever woken up and everything looks different?

Not Twilight Zone different, but enhanced. Switched on.

Where each object you look at is outlined with a thin hair of black ink with an even thinner white highlight. Crisper than crisp. And the colors sing to you, and the textures hit your eye through a magnifying glass, and everything calls out your name, and you suddenly see the spaces between things as if they too are things, with weight and volume and meaning.

The air around you feels alive, ions crackling against your skin as you swim through it…if you squint your eyes you can almost see it sparking.

You drive down the same familiar street you’ve driven down a million times, and on this particular day the trees come rushing up to meet you, arms wide, waving their leaves hello as you flow past. And the road looks like it leads directly into the sky, and you feel like you could fly up among the clouds and float there as long as you wanted.

Welcome to today.

I hope you’ve had days like this. It’s quite a fantastic thing.

If you have, on occasion, had one of these days, you might have asked yourself, “why do things look so different today, when yesterday they looked dull and flat and gray by comparison?”

Being of rational mind, you could probably spend half an hour and come up with a dozen plausible reasons why yesterday looked ordinary and today you want to roll around in everything you see.

It might occur to you that perhaps it’s a trick of the light, sunshine intensified by a solar flare. Or, you might recall that yesterday you felt crummy, but today you feel great so of course it all looks brighter.

But then, you wake up on another morning, and the sun is muffled behind gray gauze and you feel sort of average and you look out the window and see a mysterious and fascinating landscape reflected in polished silver. The trees have taken on a shimmering graphite haze, the leaves rubbed into soft focus. The colors have shifted, and now you see smoked lavender in between the branches, whose texture is soft as the velvet of a deer antler.

The stunning sense of aliveness is still there, just like last time, but there’s a different charge in the air, as if the sky is holding its breath and what you’re feeling is the electricity of the stillness. It’s daytime, but you see the aura of moolight. Everything seems filled with quiet magic.

And then you ask yourself…so why do things look different today?

You could no doubt spend another half hour and come up with another twelve explanations, all well-grounded in science and psychology.

But you would be missing the point:

You’re seeing things differently because you are SEEING things differently.

Something inside you, whether you’re aware of it or not, is DECIDING to see everything differently.

One day it sees things one way, the next, whammo.

Whole new ballgame.

If you can find that capacity inside yourself that decides how you see things, and acknowledge it and encourage it, you can get it to grow.

If you understand it for what it is, you can learn to control it.

You will begin to see things differently on a consistent basis. Your life will begin to change in magnificent ways.

And every day will be a beautiful Monday.