What Day Is This?

May 25, 2011

I’m sitting in a beach house at the Castle Hill Inn in Newport, watching the Atlantic roll in about 20 yards from my porch. It’s the first sunny day this week, while I’m here conducting the Million Dollar Consulting® College.

It’s a bright day that holds a great deal of promise. But doesn’t every day? Nietzsche said that “a day has a hundred pockets if we but know what to put in them.” A great many people awake with that positive potential, but a great many also awake asking themselves how on earth they’ll crawl through the day.

There are reasons to dread a day: illness, loss, disappointment. Sometimes life hands us grief. But too often we create our own grief. We fear, we resist, we procrastinate. Most of the time, we create our own day through our own optimism or pessimism and, in so doing, inform our behavior, our impact on others, and our success (or lack of it).

Day after day we can build on the opportunity of life or flee from its threat. After a time, these habits become ingrained, which is why you meet constantly happy and supportive people, or those already sour and defeated at 8 am.

Life is short for all of us. The horizon draws closer every day. How we choose to spend those days is up to us. Those waves outside are unceasing, but life is not. Make the best of it while you can.