Music and Meaning

We’ve established before that I’m a Nickelback fan, but I have to admit I’m loving one of their most recent songs, If Today Was Your Last Day. Now, the title pretty much says it all. This song opens with a friend giving some great advice: “Each day’s a gift and not a given right.”

I like the idea of living each day with purpose and meaning, but I find the practicality of it hard to grasp. You see, I’m a doer. I get bogged down most days in the minutae of family/home/work life. There are dishes to wash, kids to wash, laundry to… you get the picture. I like the list given in Tim McGraw’s Live Like You Were Dying: sky diving, bull riding, speaking sweeter, being a better husband and friend, going fishing, and stopping to watch an eagle overhead. These myriad ways of making life meaningful are simple and easy to grasp.

All last school year, I kept telling myself that each day, when my kids got home from school, we were going to sit down at the table and have a snack together. Talk about their days. Take a breather before the rush of homework, dinner, baths. But it never seemed to happen. Now, they had a snack every day, but I never got around to joining them because there was always something to do.

I find my To Do list often runs me, instead of the other way around. There is always more on there than I can accomplish in a day (or probably 2). And I feel guilty about that. I’ve tried to curb it, and I often can for a day or 2, before the urgency of a dozen tasks once again overruns me. I know, it’s a personality problem. :) At least I recognize my neurosis.

The 1 thing I love about the new school year is that feeling of newness, of resetting the clock and starting something over. I think we need that mid-year just as much as we do January 1st. This year, my world is changing, with both my kids being in elementary school for the first time. In addition to all those lovely writing goals I have, I am also revisiting my daily snack time goal. I really want to do this. I think it will give us a chance to reconnect after being away from each other, and find a touch of centeredness during our hectic days.

Do I wish I’d done this last year? Yes. Do I feel guilty that I didn’t? Yes. Should I let that stop me now? No. I can only live as if TODAY is my last day, not yesterday.

So aside from the nebulous ideals of forgiving enemies, embracing life, etc., what practical way would you like to enhance your life the rest of this year? What 1 simple thing would you embrace to give meaning to your life, in light of each day being a gift?

Angel

Through the years...

I don’t journal or keep a diary or anything like that. I know I should – lead the examined life and all – but I’ve never been able to keep at it consistently. But I do keep a calendar.

I live and die by my calendar. Nothing is official until it’s on the calendar. I’ll even go back and add stuff to the calendar after the fact – like my first sale wasn’t scheduled, but I went back and wrote it down and circled it in red. And I never throw them away.

DG shakes his head and calls me a pack rat, but my calendars are the journal/diary of my life. Want to know when AC cut her first tooth or slept through the night for the first time? I can pull a calendar from 2001 and tell you. And I can tell you the exact date DG took me out to dinner for the first time. It’s written in my calendar from 1994.

(I am missing many years – some got lost in a move. I mourn that loss. But it did teach me the importance of treating them with the care and respect they deserve, lest another decade of my life goes missing.)

I can tell you exactly when I fell off the wagon and broke my New Year’s Resolutions this year, because I kept track of my progress in my calendar. (No, I won’t tell you because it’s humiliating how quickly I gave up.) How many times did DG travel on business this year? What date did I leave for Scotland? When did I have my tires rotated?

From the practical to the ordinary, it’s all in my calendar. It’s not the same as a journal – I never write down what I’m thinking. I don’t examine my feelings or go deep into my psyche. But it’s my life, scribbled into neat little boxes and columns, and it can still tell me a lot about who I was and what I was doing at the time. It tells me what was important, what I was investing my time and energy in. So maybe there’s a nugget or two of wisdom in there somewhere after all.

In a couple of days, I’ll add the 2008 calendar to the stack, and I’ll be focused solely on my 2009 calendar. It’s already loaded with dates, schedules, etc, and 2009 is shaping up to be an interesting year. Who knows what else I’ll be able to add? And next December, before I tuck it away, I’ll be amazed at how far I’ve come.

Do you journal? Keep a diary? Anyone else keep their old calendars like I do?

PC