The One Way To Get The Most Out Of Each Day
How is your day-to-day life flavored by your expectations of what you will encounter each day?
Do you expect each day to have meaning, joy, and purpose? Do you expect to be awed? Do you expect to experience something, anything, that moves you?
Or is this a concept that is completely foreign to you? Do you approach each day, taking it as it comes, with no concept of expecting anything?
I believe the difference between experiencing a rich and meaningful life and a life that is “occasionally cool but mostly just OK” all comes down to our expectations.
Are you someone who looks for the spark of life inherent in each day?
I truly believe that we don’t encounter meaningful experiences in our everyday lives because we don’t expect to encounter them. Our eyes are not open. We don’t look for the exceptional, so we don’t find it. And if we’re not careful, we go days without these meaningful, experiential sparks. And the days become weeks, and weeks become months, and we turn around, and our lives are monotonous. The most precious gift we’ve been given is wasted because we’re not expecting anything.
My family has a love affair with the American West. So many family memories center on our time in places like Moab, Durango, and Jackson Hole, among others. If you have never seen grand expanses of nature, I can’t do them justice with my words. The point is that these are destinations. We set aside time and money to travel there just to see the beauty of the landscape in person. It’s hard to describe the pull it has on us.
Traveling out west, we build our itinerary around “seeing.” We book private tours with specialized guides even though seeing the parks on our own is way more affordable. Why? Not because we are frivolous with our money. And certainly not because of the exclusivity (though that is a bonus for my introverted tendencies). The reason we book private tours is mostly because of the pace. We pay for the ability to stop and see, to pause as long as we want to look at a river, or a mountain, or a canyon, relatively uninhibited by crowds and lines. We intentionally create moments where we can see and experience our surroundings.
When we travel as a family, we experience wonder because we expect to. You can go online and find negative reviews that people have left about places like the Grand Canyon, Arches, Yosemite, and so on. When I read these, something in me dies a little. I think I’m supposed to think they’re funny. But they make me sad. Why? Because a negative review of the Grand Canyon (“Overrated. What’s the big deal? Too hot.”) says something profound about the nature of the individual writing it. When you leave these places underwhelmed, it’s not the fault of the surroundings; they are simply too majestic. The issue is with the individual. Something inside them has not prepared them to expect to be moved, so they are not.
I fear that many of us go through our daily lives this way.
You would never go sightseeing at the Yellowstone in an Indy Car. Traveling past the scenic vistas at 180mph is the antithesis of taking in the scenery. And yet, we go through each day this way, don’t we? We move from task to task and appointment to appointment with very little expectation of experiencing the possibility of the moment. And yet, if we intentionally embrace a sense of expectation, we will often find wonder and meaning all around us every day.
What will it take for you to slow down? What will it take for you today to expect to encounter something that moves you to laughter, tears, wonder . . . anything?
As Christians, we live amidst the handiwork of God’s creative majesty only because Jesus purchased our very life on the cross. We live and breathe because Jesus ransomed our lives from death and sin. Shouldn’t this help our expectation problem? Shouldn’t this truth be enough to cause us to wake up and look for the myriad sources of joy and wonder in the world around us?
Because of God’s unfathomable grace and mercy, our lives have more inherent value than we can imagine. What a shame to waste opportunities to maximize this good gift because we’re too distracted to expect to encounter the good all around us.
This article originally appeared in Volume 38 of my free newsletter, Good For You.
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