Ever have one of those days when you feel like you’re just a nano-degree off kilter (which, incidentally, is just enough to make it seem like you can’t get any of the important stuff right)?

I’ve been having one of those days for months now.

And yet, I wonder how I can dwell here when there is so much beauty and creativity swimming around me. My friends are lovely and kind and generous. They are successful and happy and downright effervescent. My family is loving and present and generous. My home and my trappings are testament to a life well-lived.

I try to hold the awareness of beauty to offset my feelings of upset, but it just doesn’t seem to balance. I keep asking myself, where’s the rub? What is this pea under my mattress? And once I figure that part out, what do I do about it? How do I rekilter myself? What sort of psychic shim do I need to use to get back to “right”?

The truth is, I have a deep fear (but I prefer to call it a “suspicion” so as not to antagonize it) that there is no “right” place awaiting my return. My suspicion is that, when one lives a fully present life, a life truly in the moment, any attachment to what was or to what may be cannot abide. And, quite frankly, because I am making great efforts to live a fully present life (but, let’s face it, am clearly not a Buddhist monk), I have no idea what to do with this realization of a transient state of being.

Not so long ago, I spent great chunks of my waking life (and nearly the entirety of my sleeping life) agonizing over various injustices and betrayals of expectation—things like how my employers didn’t appreciate my contributions in the workplace and how so many of my regular encounters with people played out to prove that they just didn’t do what they said they were going to do. I lamented my ruminations about these annoyances every time they interfered with my ability to sit quietly with my daughter and look into her eyes and listen to her speak. I was so overborne by my disappointments that I was unable to absorb any of the goodness. I had become callous to my own joy.

I decided to make some really big changes to that waking life (although the sleeping life is taking its time catching up) with the intention of recapturing the ability to receive the joy that life offers so freely. I left the job where my work was undervalued, and I resolved to be more compassionate with those imperfect souls around me who, I came to recognize, were all fighting battles of their own. I gave myself some time to decompress and breathe from the years I spent cooped up on other people’s misery, and I took many moments to just breathe.

So what’s different now? I smile at people—willingly—and I offer things up rather than fearing people will try to take them from me. I let people merge into my lane in traffic. I stop what I am doing on my cell phone and talk to the person who bags my groceries. I turn off all the noise (external and internal) and listen to my daughter as she tells me what she did that excited her in school each day. I smell her clean hair and caress the powdery softness of her skin as I tuck her into bed at night. When I walk my dogs each morning, I dutifully observe cloud formations in the sky and note dewy patterns outlined by cobwebs in the grass.

Have these slight behavioral shifts sufficed to recalibrate my life into life’s equivalent of a rags-to-riches, made-for-TV-movie? You know the answer to that rhetorical question. But I’ll tell you what. They’re shim enough to give me moments of rekiltering, and when it all boils down to what’s important, that’s all I need to feel like there is “right” in my world. Whether that “rightness” endures loses importance when I feel its presence fully in that moment. What happens next, I’ll deal with then.