You don't got to be careful all the time.

I was listening to some fiction from the New Yorker magazine on my way to work this morning. (I drive about 45 minutes each way and have taken to listening to downloaded audio books and podcasts during that time — I now actually look forward to it.)

In this morning’s story, one of the characters overheard a healing conversation between his wife and daughter and reported that, “Suddenly, it felt like the weight of the world had slipped off my shoulders, and I didn’t even know I was carrying it.”

It’s a feeling I recognize.

You know how you can have one of those difficult-to-shake colds for so long that you lose track of how long you've had it or even how sick you've been until suddenly, one day, you feel better.

It takes a good moment to make you realize how normal it had become to feel bad.

The same thing happens to me all the time on a spiritual and psychological level. Something happens. I feel happy or peaceful or relieved or enriched. And only then do I notice I that I haven’t felt that integrated and whole, that happy, for quite a while.

The corollary is the thought that my happiness may just … maybe … possibly be more open to choice than I realize — although, even as I write that, I hate the over-simplification of it.

This morning just reminded me of a deep streak of carefulness in me. I hold my breath without noticing. I do it a lot — until I stop.

It’s refreshing to be reminded, as I was by that line in the story, that I don’t have to be careful all the time. And when that happens there’s a weight-of-world-slipping-away experience. It feels good.