Why we are called These Good Days

People ask about the name. The honest answer takes a bit of telling, and it starts, of all places, with a bank.

I spent twenty years working in one, loving the pace and the people. It felt fulfilling, and nobody questions a life that is going well. Then years of bad headlines wore the trust thin, a journalist’s tweet sparked a run, one run became two, and a hundred and sixty years of banking history sold off in a weekend.

I was on the inside, steadying clients and my team while we moved everything to the new owner. When the workload outgrew the day, it started keeping me awake at night. So rather than lie there wasting time, I got up at 2am and worked. I’d watched burnout take colleagues over the years. I knew every sign. I just kept believing I was the exception.

Over Easter we went to Barcelona for a family holiday. I badly needed a break, and my body took its chance to tell me what I’d been ignoring. I spent a lot of the holiday ill in our hotel room.

It was the first time I’d stopped moving in months, and stopping for long enough was all it took to register what was actually happening.

When I got home, I rang my doctor and asked for two weeks off to sort my sleep out. She signed me off and politely suggested I would likely need more than two weeks.

She was right.

What followed was the hardest stretch of my life. My nervous system was so frayed I couldn’t follow a book, a television programme, or even music. I remember taking my son out for the day and needing five buses to get us home because I couldn’t hold a thought long enough to work out the route.

There were months of tears and self-doubt, and days when getting up and getting dressed took genuine grit.

Recovery, when it came, came slowly and in pieces. Lots of walking around London. Afternoons sleeping when my brain had simply shut down. A lot of therapy. And the perseverance to read the same chapter over and over until eventually it stuck.

Simple days. Doing the mending.

It took me a while to see what those months were showing me. Somewhere in the years of getting life done, I’d forgotten to enjoy living it.

I kept circling one idea in everything I read: the good in an ordinary day doesn’t stop. We just stop seeing it. And the more we practise noticing it, the better we get at feeling it.

Then Hannah Fry, a mathematician I admire, put five words to something I’d been trying to articulate: these are the good days.

Not the days we’re waiting for. The ones we’re living now.

I set the words as the wallpaper on my phone, so they were there every time I reached for it. And slowly, they started to change what I noticed.

We become what we repeat, it turns out.

Fast forward to a summer holiday in Portugal. I was back at work by then, but getting back to work was never the goal. Getting my life back was. And not the old version, where the weeks were swallowed whole and I collapsed into every weekend.

Surfing was our thing before parenthood, paused until our son was old enough to battle the waves with us. This was that trip.

It felt like a piece of the life I was after.

Lying on the beach, tired and salty, we talked properly about the future. What we wanted the next few years to look like. What we’d build. How to hold on to actually living while we were busy getting on with life.

I’d been turning over brand names out loud for weeks. My lovely and supportive husband pointed at my phone.

The name had been on my screen every day for a year.

So the company is called These Good Days.

And the name is the instruction.

Not the good old days. Not the good days coming once everything is sorted. These ones. The ordinary Tuesday you’re in right now.

You could wait years to look back on this week fondly.

Or you could skip the wait and feel it today.

That’s the week from me, and rather more of me than usual.

Sera

These are the good days. Worth repeating.