Coming back

In the laundry room on the first floor of my building, inexplicably, the light is always left on, in spite of the fact that the room spends only a small minority of its time actually occupied by laundry-doers. It's become a near compulsion of mine, over the last two years, to walk by the room and flip the light off as I'm, say, taking out my trash. Then last week, it happened. Our management company took the light switch out so that pesky apartment building dwellers such as myself could not save them money, as well as the foster the well-being of Mother Earth herself, by turning off the light. (And I wonder why "drill, baby, drill" is considered a legitimate campaign slogan. Argh). The switch, if you're wondering, was replaced by a rectangle of beige plastic.
But more to the point, or, I guess I mean to say, to make the opposite point, I have a feeling lately that things are coming back. The plant I'd pretty much resigned myself to watching die slowly over the last six months just sprouted two beautiful new shoots. Little snippets of human connection are popping up here and there throughout my week. In general, I feel my hopefulness and sense of humor returning. A friend told me today that he's a pessimist about the small things and an optimist about the big ones. Maybe I'm the opposite. And breaking down my big picture doubts into little picture certainties has helped ground me a bit more this week. So... onward.