There are days when waking up feels heavier than it should. Nothing has happened, exactly. No fresh tragedy, no dramatic rupture, no piece of news capable of explaining the exhaustion. And yet the body wakes as if it has already been through something during the night. The light enters the room differently. The sky hangs low. The air feels too still, too cold, too humid. Before we have even thought anything clearly, we are already living inside a mood.

Perhaps this is one of the simplest ways of realising that we are not only thought. For a long time, philosophy tried to imagine the human being as a consciousness almost detached from the world, as if thinking were a clean activity, suspended above the body, temperature, light, sleep, and the city. But ordinary life contradicts this every day. We are affected by the coke we have not drunk, by the noise in the street, by excessive brightness, by a grey sky, by the wind touching our skin. The world does not remain outside us. It gets in.

Spinoza might say that we are made of affects. For him, we are not entirely sovereign beings who decide, in a purely rational way, what to feel. We are crossed by encounters. Certain things increase our power to exist; others diminish it. A sunny day may solve none of our concrete problems, but sometimes it gives the body back a sort of permission. The street seems more possible. The future less sealed. A rainy, dark, heavy day, on the other hand, can make the very same life suddenly feel harder to carry.

This does not mean that the weather determines who we are. That would be too simple. But it takes part. It gives a colour to what already exists inside us. A sadness that, on a clear day, might fit into a pocket, can take over the whole house on a grey one. A fear that seemed manageable may grow when the sky itself appears to have no exit. The weather does not invent everything, but it intensifies. It changes the inner lighting of things.

Heidegger spoke of mood, or attunement, as something fundamental in our relationship with the world. Before we interpret life rationally, we are already thrown into it in a certain way. We do not meet the world neutrally; we meet it tired, hopeful, anxious, light, irritated, melancholic. And this changes everything. A simple email can feel like a threat. A banal conversation can become unbearable. A small task can take on the size of a mountain. It is not that reality has completely changed. It is that the way we are inside it has changed.

That is why certain days seem more difficult to live than others. There are days when existence requires basic maintenance: getting up, replying, eating, working, pretending to possess a minimum degree of normality. Days when life is not exactly dramatic, but nor is it fluid. It catches. Everything seems to demand a slightly greater effort. The body is slow. The mind drags its feet. The world keeps functioning, indifferent, but we fail to keep pace.

Camus might recognise in this a small everyday absurdity. Not the grand, theatrical absurd, but the quiet one: waking up and realising that the world demands continuity even when we have no enthusiasm for continuing. The alarm rings. Messages arrive. Shops open. The city moves. And we, sometimes, are internally living under a different weather — one that does not appear in any forecast.

There is a discreet cruelty in this: the world does not pause because our mood has fallen. But there is also a kind of consolation. If mood changes with weather, light, body, sleep, then perhaps it is not an absolute sentence. What we feel on a difficult day is not necessarily the final truth about life. Sometimes it is only life seen beneath a particularly heavy sky.

Nietzsche, who distrusted great abstract truths, might have liked this idea. Many of our most serious philosophical conclusions may be born from very concrete things: bad digestion, tiredness, loneliness, too much winter, too little movement. Sometimes we think we have discovered a terrible truth about existence, when perhaps we simply need to sleep better, walk a little, open a window, or wait for the weather to turn.

This does not diminish pain. On the contrary, it makes it more human. Not every sadness needs to be immediately turned into a diagnosis, a concept, or a destiny. Some sadnesses are meteorological. Others are older, and merely find, on certain days, the right atmosphere in which to return. There are feelings that live inside us like furniture covered with sheets. A change in the light is enough to remind us that they are still there.

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body helps us understand this. We do not have a body as one has an object. We are a body. It is through the body that the world reaches us. The humidity in the air, excessive heat, lack of sunlight, cold in the shoulders, atmospheric pressure, the smell of rain on the pavement — none of this is merely scenery. It is experience. Thought does not take place in a white, isolated room. It takes place inside skin.

Perhaps that is why some days ask for less ambition. They are not days for great decisions, great conclusions, or grand interpretations of the meaning of life. They are days to get through. And getting through, sometimes, is already a dignified form of philosophy. There is a humble wisdom in recognising: today, I am not seeing clearly. Today, the light is bad. Today, my body is more vulnerable to the world.

Philosophy often seeks clarity, but life is full of atmospheres. We do not always know whether we are sad because of something, someone, the past, the future, the rain, Sunday, lack of sunlight, or simply because existence has its own shifts in pressure. Perhaps the answer does not need to be so precise. Perhaps it is enough to admit that we are porous creatures. The world touches us all the time.

And if there are days when living feels more difficult, that does not mean every day will have the same weight. Mood passes, even when it passes slowly. The sky changes, even when it takes its time. Light returns from another angle. Sometimes, without anything truly being solved, we wake up a little less crushed. Life remains the same, but we are no longer standing in exactly the same place inside it.

In the end, perhaps this is it: we are not only those who think about life. We are also those who feel it under a particular climate. There are days when the world seems to receive us badly. There are others when it opens a small gap. And until we are able to transform the whole of life, perhaps we can begin by accepting that some days do not need to be conquered with greatness. Some days only need to be lived with enough tenderness for us to reach the next one.

And in the meantime, I listen to music whilst driving and watch the raindrops hitting the windscreen.