Recently, I realized that every morning, as I’m making lunches, I am humming some sort of tune—a soundtrack for the day, if you will. Apparently, this is a habit that I have had for a long time, but I never really noticed it.

One day last month, I was humming a particularly melancholy melody which seemed to be on infinite repeat as I stacked cold cuts on cheese on bread and slathered on the mayonaise and mustard. After the umpteenth repeat, I became aware of the tone of what I was humming. And I realized that it was different from the usual morning medley. My usual morning soundtrack is upbeat and motivating. The tune that day was not.

Is my brain determining this melody? I wondered as I carefully considered my emotional state (which seemed okay, though maybe not as peppy as normal). Or is this some eerie foreshadowing of the day ahead? It was an interesting thought, one I pushed aside; I moved on with my morning activities, but the tune didn’t change.

Since that day last month, I had not focused on my morning humming. Until yesterday, that is. The tune yesterday was, again, different from the usual. It was a very determined, get-it-done type of melody. Not inspiring, exactly, but more of a dutiful tune that would follow me through the day.

It was not surprising then, when a couple hours into my work day, some not particularly positive news came my way. It was a situation that took determination to process to a marginally workable solution. But as the situation churned in my head, I went back to that theme song, the one that was different and somehow ‘out of sorts.’

Perhaps, just perhaps, my morning humming is my brain’s way of working through the events of the day that have not yet happened. Perhaps this really is a foreshadowing of the events to come since the melody is never a conscious one.

But now that I am starting to sense a pattern, the next time my theme song doesn’t seem quite right, I might just go back and bed to see if I can restart my day. Or maybe I’ll stay in bed until the next day!