There is nothing personal about a bad day
Judgement is a trap. Peace is not a luxury.
I live a life of relative peace. I have no personal adversaries, no ongoing conflicts, and I don’t go looking for them. I have reached this place in my life because I’ve made a point of erring on the side of peace and remaining neutral in all of my affairs.
Although my life is nice now, this comes about from decades of personal introspection after making many mistakes. And it all started with the notion and ultimate conviction that if I want to be happy, I have to decide to be happy.
From time to time, I might have what some people call a “bad day”. Stuff goes wrong like, I didn’t get what I wanted for Christmas, my car didn’t start or I stubbed my toe. Some might call that a bad day, but I don’t take it personally when things go south.
Murphy’s Law says that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Well, if everything went wrong right here, right now, I’d be dead.
There is so much that can go wrong in a living organism, isn’t there? Yet I’m still filtering air and water as I write this. Even on a difficult day, a ton of things have gone right, but most people focus on the bad parts. And they take it personally.
While it is true that I’ve had some very difficult and trying days in the past, I avoid casting judgment upon them. I don’t call them good or bad days.
I find that casting judgment on a day only makes that day more difficult to bear. I have also seen the tendency in myself to take credit for a good day, when the reality is, most of what happens in a day isn’t really my fault.
I usually rise before the sun when my day starts. The disposition of the sun is completely beyond my control. If the sun doesn’t rise, well, I can say that I’m having a bad day if I want to.
But there is a certain implication about bad days. Bad days are about me. Bad days are for me. Bad days are my fault, punishment just for me being alive.
I don’t buy into that implication because I don’t pass judgment on my days. I can’t. I have no power over people, places and things, and my days are one of those things.
I can recall a day when I was standing at the deli counter in a supermarket placing an order. The attendant says, “Oh, what a beautiful baby daughter you have there!” I smiled and said, “It’s not my fault.” She laughed. Really, it wasn’t a conscious decision.
Babies are born cute for evolutionary reasons and so many other factors beyond my control. Yes, it’s a good thing she’s cute, for that ensures her survival. But I only played a tiny part in her cuteness. The rest is up to mother nature.
I love the movie, “Groundhog Day” starring Bill Murray. This is the story of a man who gets trapped in the same day over and over again. At first he hates it. He’s mean to everyone. He hurts people. He tries to stop the cycle by killing himself. Over and over. Nothing works.
So he tries to make the best of it. He begins to see that at every moment of that day, he can make choices and so he starts to experiment with it. In the process of learning how to make each day a little better, he falls in love with a woman he sees everyday, literally.
Murray’s character was faced with the same day over and over again. He had a choice to make it a good day or a bad day, for himself and everyone else. In the end, he decided to make it a better day, every day.
Mind you, he was working within his sphere of influence and eventually he came to know everything that would happen that day, since every event that wasn’t within his control ran on repeat. He was graced with the memory of how each day passed, so he made a choice to improve himself every day as long as he was going to be stuck there.
There were extras on the original Groundhog Day DVD, including an interview with Harold Ramis the director of the movie. In the interview, Ramis said that the original story had Murray’s character living through the same day for 10,000 days.
Think about that. You’re stuck in the same day, over and over again for 10,000 days. That’s about 27 years.
If you knew what was going to happen and you could change your response to the day with each repeat, and everyone else was the same day after day, could you still have a bad day? Wouldn’t you try to make every day a little bit better?
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The universe is a reflection of everything that I am thinking and feeling right now. I get to choose what I think and feel because every day is Groundhog Day. I choose to err on the side of peace. I have chosen a way of life to make every day a peaceful day.
When I’m having a difficult day, I can ask for help because the day is not about me. Without judgment in play, I can consider the difficulty of my day in the context of my capacity to respond, rather than my motivation to have a better day.
Everyone is motivated to have a good day. Not everyone has the skills or capacity to make the day better when things aren’t going their way.
If I don’t like the way I feel after I do something, I cut it out and do something else. I repeat that process until I have peace. My days tend to be less difficult, that way.
Write on.