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.