WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES

What are the WORST things that could happen to you in the next 24 hours?

When asked that question people generally lock on to the following events:

Death
Accident
Serious illness

Now the brighter side of that question: What are the BEST things that could happen to you in the next 24 hours?

I would ask you to stop reading and give serious thought to your answers to this "best/worst" question. Your answers must be personal (could happen to YOU) and could happen in the next 24 hours of your life.

[Pause here for thinking.]

What did you discover?

As this is a highly personal exercise I can only speak for my highly personal self, I found the greater likelihood of something bad happening in my life in the next 24 hours than of something good happening.

If you find more good than bad, (promotion, birth of a child, inheritance from an uncle you didn't know existed, and if you did know him you wouldn't miss him anyway)--congratulations! Then move on to the next 24 hours. The day after the best thing occurred, what's the best/worst that can happen?

After a few rounds of this exercise reality sets in, you're going to die. You'll probably be very sick before you die. As a human, you are an accident waiting to happen.

The conclusion I came to is, for most of us a twenty-four hour period is considered good when the bad stuff doesn't happen!

In a world where "big bads" are certain, and "big goods" are uncertain, what's the upside of this life?

When this fact first burrowed into my brain, I thought I had just paid in full for a life's membership in club pessimism. (What would be the use, they would only loss my membership anyway!) But the more thought I gave it, the more I realized the "best/worst" question might well be the mother of all life's lessons.

If "big bads" are certain, "big goods" are uncertain, then the joy of living HAS to be in experiencing and wallowing in the multitude of "little goods" that makes up every minute of every day.

Everything from eyes open in the morning to eyes shut at night, the list of what is good in your life is endless (The sunrise/sunset, the touch of a loved one, the lick of a dog, or the touch of a dog and the lick of a loved one, whatever). The things you can appreciate in your life are everywhere. The "little goods" have been the fodder of best selling books, grist of motivational speeches, lyrics of pop songs and the prattle in poems. The pleasant little thing in life have been embroidered on doilies, slapped on posters and forwarded by every well meaning friend with access to e-mail.

Most of the "little goods" seem, on the surface, to be sloppy, sentimental, simpering, syrupy and sappy, yet without fully embracing the sun, friends and dogs in your life, your knowledge of the inevitability of "big bads" could drive you nuts.

That is why it is so important to savor every moment of the "little goods". Maximizing the good things is conceptually easy because there are many more "little goods" in a life than "big bads". A life is wasted when you let yourself become so fixated on the few "big bads," you let the many "little goods" that make life worth living go by unnoticed.


Lesson: Everything you have ever loved in life will someday be taken from you--but you have them now.