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Rule #66. A bad day is not a bad life.
Have you ever had one of those days where nothing goes right? You’re running late, you get a flat tire, your umbrella blows away, and then you lose your keys? I’ve had plenty of those days. You know, when your jobs a joke, you’re broke, and your love life’s D.O.A. —
Wait a minute…
Okay, back on track. I try to be a very positive person. It’s not my natural compass heading, but I have put a lot of effort into it over the years, and I feel like I’m a happier and more effective person because of it. But life doesn’t always go right. Things don’t always go according to plan. Sometimes we all just have a shitty day.
And that’s okay. It’s okay to feel down or blue. You don’t always have to find the silver lining (even though it’s almost always there) It’s perfectly acceptable to have a bad day.
Just recognize that a bad day is not a bad life.
You can have an absolutely terrible day and still have a good life. That’s what happened to me a few weeks back. After someone hit my bumper in the grocery store parking lot and drove off, I had a string of crummy days. Bad things kept happening, and I couldn’t seem to get a break.
But my life was still pretty damn good. The people who are important to me were still healthy. Clarissa and I still had a roof over our head. As soon as I stopped focusing on what was going bad, and started thinking about what I had to be grateful for, things started looking up.
Like I said, it’s okay to have a bad day. The problem is that when we have one, we tend to get ourselves into a downward spiral, then get stuck. We’re quick to think of all the things that are going wrong while we ignore the good things in our life.
Don’t do that.
Accept your bad day. Be in a bad mood if you need to. Just don’t stay there. Don’t confuse your bad day with a bad life.
Because while your life isn’t perfect, there’s probably some great stuff in it. Don’t take the good stuff for granted by becoming fixated on the bad. Embrace the good, and don’t confuse a bad day for a bad life.
“Rules for Intrepid Living” is an ongoing weekly article suggesting how we can all live a more adventurous life.