Live Each Day As If It Were Your First

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”  Most of us will have heard this quote before.  It’s commonly used for important days—weddings, births, graduations, or smaller, more personal events that send you on a different path.  But it’s a bit of a confusing statement.  For example, what exactly is “the rest of your life”?  What makes it so different from the life that you’ve been living up until this day?  You will still breathe air and look at things.  You will still get up in the morning, go to work, get things in your eyes, trip over the shoes you left on the floor the night before.  In its banal realities, life doesn’t change all that much.

So what does it mean, to be looking at “the rest of your life”?  For me, I like to think of it as a path.  The metaphor has been used before, of course, but the old sayings have stuck around because they work.  Life is a path, then, and a person’s life, while it may twist around or squirm under certain obstacles along the way, generally heads in a single direction.  You decide that direction with goals or dreams that guide you, and with your “eyes on the prize” as it were, you trot along your path.

Following this logic (no pun intended), there will come a time when you change your direction, for any number of reasons.  Maybe the destination you had in mind is no longer realistic, or you no longer want to end up there.  Maybe you discover another goal or dream that is more appealing.  Maybe, and unfortunately, something happens that forces you to find a different way.  But in that moment—on “the first day of the rest of your life”—you make a turn.  It can happen quickly, and so subtly that you might not even notice.  But it happens.

The funny thing is, and the reason I’m rambling in metaphor, a life can change in a heartbeat.  The change can be catastrophic, or it can be as simple as changing your mind.  One little action can send you somewhere you never expected.  And there is no quantifiable length to “the rest of your life.”  The time stretches or shrinks as necessary.  Therefore, every day might be the first in a new life, a new path or journey.  Every single day has that potential, and you never know which day might be the one you look back upon as that critical turning point.  So we should treat each day with that kind of respect, and live it, not as if it were our last, but as if it were the first of something wonderfully new.

Nothing Has Life Except The Incomplete

Given any opportunity, I would call myself a complex person.  I have deep thoughts, educated opinions (on some things), and a way of wording these thoughts and opinions that makes me sound worthy of someone’s attention.  Yet I find myself very uninteresting these past few weeks.  I have nothing to think about, nothing to say that I could say with any real confidence in my listener’s interest.  So here I am, twenty-five days after my last post, indulging myself in wondering why.

It isn’t that I haven’t been motivated to work.  I’ve written dozens of pages in my various writing projects, and work progresses in my music, as well.  When it comes to my blog, however, the record of my deep thoughts and intelligent opinions, I’ve got nada.  Why?

I’ve been going through some of my old journals, recently, and in one of them is page after page of insightful contemplations on nature, my relationships, and the world in general.  There are dozens of them, dated within days of one another.  True, these written musings were assignments for a class, but we had no prompts, and I don’t remember ever struggling to find something to write.  Three times a week, sometimes more, there was something that inspired me, something that I wanted to remember, to think about--for example, is it a good thing that we can perceive differences between human faces and features?  What does my name mean, and what does that meaning mean for who I am, if anything?  Why do we call it "falling" in love?  And this was four years ago, at the beginning of a college education meant to make me more complex and insightful.  What does it mean that I don’t have anything to say now?

The only variable that seems to matter is environment.  Back then, I was introducing myself to the Hollins community, which is known for its creativity and open-minded acceptance of all kinds of opinions.  Surrounded by intelligent people, all seeking their own answers to hundreds of questions, I couldn’t help but seek on my own, even if I didn’t know what questions to ask. 

Now, heaven forbid that I imply my family is not intelligent.  My parents, my brothers and sisters, they are all brilliant people, with their own feelings and thoughts on the world.  But I can’t help but shake the sense that for me, this is a place of answers and not of looking for them.  This is home; it is a destination, not a stop on the journey.  So while my creativity remains untouched, I don’t feel the need to dig deeper.  I don’t need to think about myself or my world, because this familiar place gives me a comfortable picture of both.

I don’t really want to be comfortable, though.  I want to search, to agonize, to fret and rejoice and contemplate what is within and without.  I want to question myself, and I want some of those questions to go unanswered.  Yeats was right: to have life, we need to be incomplete, because that is what makes us move, makes us question, makes us glow.

In Response to Bad Metaphors and Cruel Theology

Here’s a very important writing tip: when it comes to metaphors, a little bit goes a long way.  The same advice might be useful when you’re talking about faith.  I just finished reading a blog post on The Christian Post entitled Kill Your Sin Before It Kills You.  If you choose to click the link, good luck.  The article consists of an extended metaphor comparing a pet snake to personal sin.  The writer of the post explains that we are all given this pet snake at birth, and throughout our lives we are tempted to feed and play with this pet, and we believe—erroneously, according to the author—that we can control the snake.

Okay.  I can run with that.  But by the sixth time this pet snake is mentioned, I’m rolling my eyes.  Yeah, man, I get it.  Also, this metaphor doesn’t actually work very well.  Sin isn’t something you can kill, because no one is perfect, and no one ever finishes making him- or herself a better person.  It’s a never-ending process.  About halfway through the article, the writer seems to realize this, and informs his readers that “[sin] is not just a snake—it’s a zombie snake.”  As one of my friends put it, “umm…”  Metaphors also don’t mix.  Ever.  If you don’t have one that works, don’t use it.

Now, I can see how this writer thought the metaphor would be perfect.  In the Bible, the serpent was the creature who tempted Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  It is the embodiment of sin.  Rather fitting, right?  And the writer even has a real-life story to fit the metaphor, which makes it even more powerful, right?

Except this is my real beef with this article.  The story the writer told?  It involves a man in his community who once had a pet snake, a boa constrictor which strangled the man, who died nine hours later.

I’m sorry, but using a story like this to lecture people about their sins is incredibly poor taste.  By using the story in this way, the writer implies that the owner of the snake got exactly what he deserved.  No word on whether this man was a bad person, by the way.  The writer has gotten so lost in his metaphor that the real snake has become sin, and so he condemns the man for “playing with the snake”.  The poor man has been sacrificed in order to make the writer’s close-minded point.        

There are many other complaints I could make about this post—the excessive use of ellipses, the use of an accusatory “you” rather than an all-encompassing “we”, the Bible verse in every second paragraph—but I’ll stick to the main point.  This writer takes an example of a man he probably knew and, showing no respect for the dead, uses him and a bad metaphor to point a critical finger at his readers.  Well, sir, to you I say in equal Biblical style: “There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy.  Who are you to judge your neighbor?”  James 4:12.  Give that to your snake to chew on.