Buena Vista has its first athletic event of the year later today. And for the first time in awhile, that means nothing to me. I won’t be checking my email every three minutes for cross country results. I don’t think that will be all bad.
A few nights ago I was thinking about how long I was at Buena Vista. Three years. Three whole years! That is not an insignificant amount of time. And obviously all of it came after being diagnosed with ALS. I was so lucky to be able to do something I loved for quite awhile.
When I was diagnosed, I thought that things would change so rapidly that I wouldn’t have time to enjoy things as they were happening. I thought about how I was going to squeeze 50 odd years of living down to five or so. It boggled my mind at times. I found myself anxiously trying not to “waste” a moment, whatever that meant. I ended up justifying every seemingly petty thing I did or wanted to do that I thought might appear frivolous. However, the only person that I was justifying to was myself.
With rare exceptions along the way, the people around me have been very supportive of my decisions on how to spend my seemingly limited time. The only person who was regularly critical of how I spent my time was me. I didn’t want to be piddling away what time I had left, yet for the first time in my life I had the nagging feeling that somehow I was. Putting an exact number on your life expectancy does a lot to your head.
Since those early months after my diagnosis, I have come to the conclusion that I was trying to play a game that can’t be won. You cannot squeeze 50 years into five years. It can’t be done. Anyone who lives 45 years longer than I do will have different life experiences. That’s life. You can’t fight the space/time continuum (at least not without a flux capacitor).
The real trick is trying to squeeze five years of living into five years. Or one year of living into one year. Or one month of living into one month.
Each one of those units of time is composed of days. And days, by nature, have their limits. You can only do so much in a day after all. But, you can do so much in a day. I have heard, “you can approach every day with a good attitude or a bad one. Everything will fall in to place accordingly.” There is a lot of truth in that.
So I try to have days that are meaningful by approaching each day fresh, even if the previous one was rotten. I figure if most of my days in a week are meaningful and enjoyable, then overall my week will have been meaningful and enjoyable. If the majority of my weeks in a month are meaningful and enjoyable, then my month will have been meaningful and enjoyable. And so on.
It all starts with a single day. I have yet to find a way to squeeze 10 days into one. But I have had some pretty darn good days. I can’t believe that those days at Buena Vista piled up to be three years. I am fortunate that it lasted as long as it did. My best memories are of when I was having “great days” covering events. My worst were days I dwelled on the fact that I couldn’t control how long I would be there.
The difference between the great days and the bad ones was simple. On the bad days, I didn’t appreciate that particular day and instead focused on how many days I would “miss out on”. On the good days, I was caught up in the moment and living that day the best way possible.
It sounds so simple and trite when I say something like that. But to me, it rings true. So now that I am out of the office, I am looking for new ways to have more good days than bad, but the same principle applies. Rather than dwelling on what I might be missing out on, I look to appreciate what does fill my day.
And right now, I am not shedding any tears about not having to write a cross country story.