If today is the first day of the rest of your life…. then…. what are you doing with the rest of your life? Maybe I should be asking: what does this phrase mean to you, for you? Is it a yawn? Is it the chance for a new start? Is it a tad scary? Is it empowering? And those are only some of the possible reactions.
The last thing this revelation should be is crippling. What this concept does is to give us all ‘another chance’/a clean slate and, for me, I can use all the 2nd/3rd/etc. chances I get. Paul in one of his letters talks about doing the things that he didn’t want to do and not doing the things he did want to do. This is true for all of us. But if we consider, ‘first day’, as a time to start anew then we become empowered to be our better self.
It really is our mindset that determines how we react to/interact with this concept. It’s not that with a clean slate we are wiping out yesterday because yesterday should be our motivation for today. If we didn’t do what we wanted/’shoulda’ then now we can look to today to not repeat the mistakes of yesterday. If it was one of those lovely days that we did do what we wanted/shoulda then we can look at that behavior as a positive, a possible repeat and learn from it.
A corollary to this is… do we give others the opportunity for second chances? Do they ‘deserve’ that first day grace? And I’m not suggesting that you forget what happened, just that you consider that they should have the opportunity to ‘correct’ and improve.
One thing we can’t do is to look on this as a time to change the consequences of yesterday’s actions (or lack of actions). It happened, it was. it must be dealt with, and it can’t be forgotten but… Yesterday was, ‘first day’ is a new start.
