What Is a Day?

What is a day? Seems like a simple enough question doesn’t it? We could answer the question any number of ways - It’s a twenty-four-hour period, typically beginning at 12:00 am, midnight, and ending at 11:59:59, twenty-four hours later – fair enough. Some people might say that a day is the amount of time it takes the earth to make one complete rotation on its axis – fair enough again.

A day, a simple, ordinary day. Most of us get so many of them, 29,200 if you live to be 80 years old, that we fall into the trap of thinking of them as just that, ordinary. But what if I told you that there is nothing “ordinary” about a day, any day. In fact, every day is extraordinary, incredibly special, and unique? Would you think I’m a little bit crazy? You’d probably be right, but that’s not the point. The point is that they are, if… if you have the mind, heart, and soul to see them that way.

Consider for a moment, what happens on an “ordinary” day. According to the United Nations World Population Prospects report, 7,452 people die every day in the United States alone, and a total of 151,600 people die each day worldwide; it certainly wasn’t an “ordinary” day for them, or for those who cared about them.

On a more positive note, there are, on average, 10,800 births in the United States each day, while UNICEF estimates that, on average, there are approximately 353,000 births each day worldwide; not an “ordinary” day for them either. Doing the math that’s about 200,000 souls being added to the world’s population each and every day, a not so “ordinary” day for the world at large.

If that’s not enough to convince you, consider the following facts that occur each and every “ordinary” day: there are over 8.5 million lightning strikes on the planet; the world’s chickens will lay 190 million eggs; the world’s inhabitants will flush the toilet 22 billion times; almost 70,000 trees will be cut down; there will be 18,000 storms; your body will lose and reproduce up to 50 trillion cells; each of us will say about 50,000 words (in a lot of cases not such a good thing), and a Mayfly will live out its entire life. The crazy statistics go on and on but the ultimate truth remains the same, no day is “ordinary”.

Still not convinced? Then consider the following: December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or how about October 24, 1929, the day the great stock market crash began, when millions lost their entire life savings. What about November 22, 1963, the day President John F Kennedy was assassinated, or July 20, 1969, the day Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon? What about December 17, 1903, when the Wright Brothers first flew the first powered airplane over a wind-swept beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina? What about April 12, 1861, the first battle of the American Civil War, a war that would claim well over 600,000 American lives before it ended. Or April 19, 1775, when “the shot heard round the world” was fired at the Battle of Lexington, and the colonies began their fight for independence?

I could go on and on, but hopefully, the point is clear – there is no such thing as an “ordinary” day. The truth is, each day begins, and each day ends, but what we make of the hours, the minutes, the moments in between is up to us. We can see them as “ordinary,” or we can see them as the amazingly precious gifts they are.

We can see them as “ordinary,” or we can understand that each and every moment holds the potential to change the course of our lives forever. Every “ordinary” moment of every “ordinary” day contains within it the opportunity to make a choice, a choice to change, a choice to be better than we were the moment before, a choice to understand that this “ordinary” moment of this “ordinary” day is all we have until we are granted the gift of the next precious, “ordinary” moment.

Albert Einstein once said, there are two ways to see the world, one is that nothing is a miracle, and the other, that everything is a miracle. If we choose to see nothing as a miracle then I suppose the moments and days become nothing special, something to get through, and so we exist, living colorless, tasteless, joyless lives until our days are over.

But, if we choose to see everything as a miracle, then it immediately becomes clear that the very “ordinary” moment we exist in, since it too, is part of “everything”, is a miracle in and of itself – and what could be further from the “ordinary” than a miracle?

No, I am absolutely convinced that there is no such thing as an “ordinary” day, just what we make of the ones we’re given. Mark Twain once wrote, “The two most important days of a person’s life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” May you find your “Why”, and find the miraculous in each and every moment, of each and every day.