“How was your day?”
A common expression, generally done out of habit at the dinner table or upon arrival home, this little phrase is the first sentence in a Cliff Notes version of your life, written each day.
What comes out is entirely up to you, each and every day.
Too often than not, a series of mishaps, misadventures and stresses come tumbling from our lips. It seems that not so secretly, we have divulged that indeed, it was a miserable day.
Except, upon close, honest inspection, we realize it was not a bad day at all. In fact, most of us don’t experience too many bad days, should we properly define the term.
The problem is we defined a bad day long ago, in our first world sort of way.
The dog chewed up a toy, dinner burned and there are 455 dishes in the sink. We got angry at someone at work that didn’t do what we asked and didn’t think just like we wanted (the nerve, right?). After all, we are perfect and our way is clearly the best way, the only way.
Among my many faults, I have a cleanliness OCD wire in my brain that malfunctions constantly. I can’t enjoy anything without order in the kitchen and living room. And the more I try to let this go, the stronger the grip becomes. It is what I complain about to those that I care about. I’m half-tempted to just completely let go and not touch anything for a month to break my addiction to order and cleanliness.
We’re all guilty of this, it’s just we might have a different wire shorting out upstairs.
For some, other people trigger it, for others, politics might set them off. Could be anything, but the point is, we all have something that sets us down a path that has increasingly made the world a more difficult place to enjoy.
And only we are to blame for this paralyzing negativity that repeats itself and spreads like a disease. In fact, people you didn’t even talk to today or don’t even know are potentially being affected by your negativity – and mine – right now.
Somewhere, a friend is telling their spouse how horrible you are because you snapped at them about not going Dutch at lunch. Your brother is belittling your recent stance on gun control to your aunt, which of course led to a conversation with the cousin you haven’t seen in 10 years about the time you played cowboys as kids and used up all the nerf bullets, making you now, later in life, a hypocrite on gun control.
In turn, you talk about them as a defense mechanism.
And what does this get us? A distressed, angry society on the verge of completely flipping out until one day we do, in the most public of ways, of course, through social media or at a family dinner.
In short (too late), a life wasted.
And we’re already wasting enough of life, in the day-to-day, are we not? Consuming ourselves with gossip of either the civilian, hometown or celebrity kind, or with discussions on Mount Rushmore’s of basketball, the Dolphins locker room environment or if Apple has lost its touch because its latest gadget didn’t change your world and make you even more obsessed with playing with it and thereby ignoring your friends and family for hours on end.
These are all just distractions from the things that you’ll forget to remember when you’re old, should you be so lucky.
I read a fantastic piece in The New Yorker by Roger Angell, a 93-year-old man who still has all his faculties and clearly writes better in his 10th decade on this planet that I will ever. He speaks fluidly, and from the heart, about how much of life is underappreciated until there is nothing left but a wish for more time to appreciate it.
We’re just too busy to notice how eager we are to tell everyone how busy we are.
In truth, we were all wired wrong along the way. At some point, earlier in our lives, we were molded by a litany of different forces all impressing upon us what is and what is not important.
And most likely, it was wrong.
Yes, it’s important to be honest, to be on time, to give your best effort. Perfection is to be strived for, but can never be obtained.
We just are not perfect. And we never will be.
But hey, we’ve been told to “win” the game of life, so perfection can be obtained and will be obtained. Everything shall indeed henceforth be perfect.
Except it won’t.
Success and winning are notions based on what we perceive – what our parents and our friends and family perceived – to define those terms. Money, popularity, awards. These somehow justify that what was done to obtain them is in fact winning and success.
It’s not. We can’t define a game, what it means to win it, when we don’t even know how to play. We’re too busy looking at the scoreboard to notice what’s happening in the moment.
We’re missing it – all of us. We care more about our reputation and what is perceived to the point we don’t even know who we are.
The irony is, while we revel in one breath the success of individuals like Steve Jobs, Mark Twain or Albert Einstein, who thought and acted differently from the crowd, in the next breath we’re heartbreakingly removing those very elements from our lives and those closest to us.
“Act right!”
“Be normal!”
“Don’t embarrass me!”
After you are gone, the world will remember bits and pieces for a while, kept alive by those who knew you, knew of you and that you left your imprint on.
In short, as the saying goes, people remember how you made them feel. They will not remember what kind of gas mileage your environmentally safe car got, or that time your two-year-old pulled a total two-year-old move and threw a tantrum in the toy aisle of Target in front of everyone.
In reality, it wasn’t that bad. A minute or two of screaming on a random Thursday morning, and it wasn’t so much in front of everyone as it was an elderly gentleman four aisles over that you only noticed when he walked by four minutes later.
In short (too late, again), we tend to blow things a bit out of proportion.
And when you are gone, people might remember that, but only briefly.
The point is, we spend an inordinate amount of time looking at the ground instead of up at the sky. And if you take that as a faith-based metaphor, so be it. If you take that as a more direct reference to an artistic and emotive world, where there is more beauty in the sky – even on a rainy day – than the ground, then so be that as well.
But are we describing sunsets or potholes in our lives?
What if the world’s problems could be solved if we simply started with ourselves and our four walls? Would discussions of gun control, taxes and the dysfunctional Dolphins locker room still be as relevant or important if we all just got a little happier, took the things that really don’t matter a little less seriously?
Perhaps the Beatles were right, love is all you need.
Smile more, grumble less.
Stop counting down to the next “big day” on your social calendar and realize the ones in between make it worth the wait. Those big dates are just mile markers, but the best stuff happens in the middle, in the daily.
Forget, as best you can, the wiring in your brain telling you to not be a minute late, that this, that and everything in between are really, really, super important. It’s life. It’s kind of all important and not at the same time.
Just enjoy the ride instead of examining the fuel intake ratio.
And the next time someone asks, “How was your day?”
Well, remember it’s all in how you define the answer, not the question.
You might be able to answer that you won today.
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