Live each day like there's not much time left

Sudden and unexpected deaths should place immediacy in our lives, motivate us to live each day to the fullest and to never postpone anything. I have a wonderful job as a college instructor. I anticipate the beginning of a new school year the same way many eagerly anticipate the change of the seasons. It means new life, new experiences, new opportunities to help young lives understand the value of an education and the role that education will play in their lives forevermore. But a recent article estimated that as many as three fourths of all Americans work at jobs they DON'T like. I've had a couple of jobs like that in the earlier days of my life and I remember the stress related to those jobs. I remember not wanting to fall asleep at night because I knew when I woke up, it would be time to go to work at a job I didn't like.

There's only two things a person can do to reconcile a situation like that. They can either try their best to find something about the job they DO like, or find another job. Unfortunately, most people do neither. They continue to work in an undesirable job for most, if not all, of their adult life and deprive themselves daily of the joys and rewards a satisfactory work experience can bring.

We see the same thing happen with people in relationships. It's not only obvious to the people in failed or failing relationships, it's obvious to everyone else too. They're not happy, they're not being fulfilled at a particular level, or several levels, and sometimes no level at all, they're not married to their best friends and, in fact, they're often married to their worst enemy. Their relationships are punctured and fraught with dissension and arguing. They go to bed with frowns on their faces and wake up the same way and, because they're so unhappy, they're being bad role models for their children as well. They come up with all kinds of excuses. They might say that there's no guarantee that if they left one relationship and began another one that it would be any better than the one they left. Or they say they're staying in the relationship for the sake of the children and that maybe when the kids are gone, they'll leave too. Or they convince themselves that no one has a model marriage and that they should just live with the choice they made.

Alibis, justifications, excuses and rationalizations rule our lives. Jeff Goldblum in the movie, "The Big Chill," said that rationalizations are more important than sex because he can go a few days without having sex but he can't go more than a few hours without a rationalization and I think that captures the lives of many of us. We rationalize our lives away. We see bliss and joy and happiness if we would just change our behavior but we convince ourselves that it's a mirage. One of my favorite sayings is that if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.

Few if any of you would sit around day after day, week after week, as months grow into years, watching shows on television that you don't like. In fact, most of you wouldn't spend any time at all watching a television show you didn't like. You would change the channel. But we do that repeatedly and incessantly with our own lives. It seems we convince ourselves we're going to live forever and that we will always have time in the future to change our lives but we just can't do it right now. So we don't change the channel, even though we don't like the channel we're on.

But we don't live forever and far too few of us will ever take our happiness into our own hands and do whatever it takes to squeeze a little joy and bliss out of the lives we have while it's still time. I can't think of anything worse than sitting in your rocking chair when you're old and decrepit, thinking about all the things you didn't do and wishing you had. Even if we try new things that don't work out, at least we know. But by not taking personal responsibility for our own happiness and changing the things we can change, we'll NEVER know.

Regardless of how long we've denied ourselves, it's still possible to change things for the better. Attitude always precedes behavior. If we decide we deserve happiness, then that change in attitude will result in a change in behavior. If we don't, it won't. And it's important to note here that I'm not talking about risking everything to seek a short-term thrill, I'm talking about changing our lives in the pursuit of long-term contentment and happiness that we currently don't have.

Because if you live each day as if it was your last, one of these days you're going to be right.