Every day is a good day...

My dad's favorite saying - "Every day is a good day, some days are just better." I say it all the time, try to adhere to it, but don't always fully subscribe to it. Every day should be a good day, but let's face it, some days just suck. Every day is different, every day is an opportunity every day gives us something to remember, or something that we would like to forget.

There are days that I have lost completely... lost to thought, lost to regret, lost to feeling sorry for myself, lost to the general nature of someone who is ADD by nature, curious sometimes to a fault... without laying out all the shortcomings of my life and personality, let's just say that there are many days that I could've used for better, more meaningful purpose. Each day allows me the chance to see who I am and what makes me tick. At night, staring into the nightime abyss before I allow sleep to overtake me, I try to take inventory of the day's successes, failures, opportunities, and challenges... and to try to memorialize those things that were of most value to me. I try to learn every day, grow every day, and get better every day. As one of those members of the human race, I do not succeed every day.

As I look back at the past five or six years of my life, I have been blessed with some wonderful occurrences. I cannot begin to enumerate here how my life has been enlarged and enriched by some of the people and happenings that have been brought my way. Too often, however, I am probably committing myself to personal paralysis by allowing some of these grand happenings to become enshrined in a personal Hall of Fame to the point that I suspend so many other pursuits in my life. I tend to focus on them to the exclusion of continuing to live my life.

For all the richness that some experiences bring, we keep them in our memory. We cherish them, and relive them. If they become a kind of trinket of an obsessive nature that we are only too happy to fawn over and worship, we can become a hostage to a past that for all its loveliness and excitement, is still in the past. I have done that, too many times. There are times that I would rather ruminate over some distant memory than to seize the day of which I am currently feasting upon, and thereby lose it forever. I love so many of my memories - there have been some golden moments in my life... but do I do myself and those currently in my life a disservice by dragging this past around like a ball and chain.

We can't revisit our past, outside of in our memory. We can recast it to be larger than it was, and construct it into a shrine that requires special care and handling. We clean and sanitize our memories, and take away all that is disagreeable and elevate it to a status far beyond what the reality held for us. Sometimes this is a necessary pursuit, as we need to, at least I do... construct these monuments in order to bring purpose and drive to life that might ordinarily stall or stagnate at some mundane and thankless task.

There are some memories worth preserving, no doubt. Some that always make me smile, or pause and feel a warmth that life can want to suck from us on a regular basis. The trick is in having the memory be a photograph, to be viewed and reflected upon with joy and a smile... When it becomes your favorite movie, and you linger over it repeatedly and expending hours and hours and replaying it in your mind in betwixt, it is beyond a memory and into the realm of fixation. It is fine line to be walked... linger over a good memory... but life is to be lived in the here and now. Kind of like driving - you need to look in your mirrors once in awhile, but if that is where all your attention is... an accident is not just likely, but inevitable.