The Magic of Bad Days

On your best day, you spring from your bed, electric with vigour. On your worst, you may want to lie prostrate and pull the blanket up to your neck, or over your head, to let the dark warmth swallow you.

Some people have more good days than bad. Some more bad than good. But what we all have, while we live, are days.

Then lies the question of what to do with them.

There's a sense in which good days, by their very nature, take care of themselves. They have meaning and purpose and measure and vibrance. They have joy and satisfaction. They carry with them the hope of being re-lived. They are, whatever shape they take and whatever their hours contain, memorable in the best way.

It's the bad days that get you.

Who knows how much you'll get done on a bad day? Who knows what you'll miss? What you'll flee? All the myriad ways things might go wrong?

But the biggest problem with bad days is their ability to define themselves. And the ways we can habitually resign ourselves to their whimsy.

A bad day can announce itself first thing in the morning or steal up silently beneath a smokescreen of tasks. Sometimes the quality of your day is a function of what happened to you. But more often, it's a function of how quickly you relent to those happenings; how close you keep your white flag, ready to be waved in the face of slight inconvenience.

How quickly do you give up when the going gets tough? How soon do you retreat?

I think in the long run, whatever work you put your hands to each day, your satisfaction with your output will not depend on the number of great days you can manifest – even though that's all that seems to matter sometimes.

Life satisfaction can often boil down to the number of mediocre days you can endure. How many bad days you can make good, or find small solace within.

Bad days can come on the Monday after a fitful Sunday slumber. Or on rainy afternoons where boredom quietly consumes dusk, leaving you with nothing but sleep and the fear of the day ahead. Then there are, of course, those incomprehensible mornings where your arms feel heavy, and nothing seems worth the effort.

It's these days, and your capacity to wrestle with them, that play an outsized role in determining the trajectory of your life.

I won't pretend they never come, because they do, and they are myriad. But they have always come; to all of us.

The good you do on a bad day compounds in ways we frequently underestimate. In incremental actions – contributions to your work that you'll be thankful for tomorrow. In small safe sanctuaries – time spent with friends and loved ones, creating fragments of thought you'll quietly cherish one day. And the muscle memory of a conquering spirit.