By Jim Hunt for the News and Journal
As my granddaughter Sadie came in the house, we all yelled, “Happy Birthday!” as her eyes widened and she looked at the streamers and cake with six candles. She took it all in for a moment before proclaiming, “This is the best day of my life!”
I had heard those words before, from the same little voice, when she graduated from preschool and when they gave her two toys with her Happy Meal at McDonald’s. Her short life has been filled with “best days” on many occasions, and I wondered if there might be a message in her exclamations.
I thought about my own life and when I stopped saying that “this is the best day of my life.” As you get older, it seems that those “best days” are often filed away in the past and linger like distant memories. Weddings, births, graduations, big promotions, championships won or almost won—they all take their place in the scrapbook of our minds. With each gray hair and each ache in the back, we can start to believe that the great days are behind us.
But are they?
Watching my granddaughter, I realized that she doesn’t compare today with yesterday, or this birthday with the last one. She doesn’t sit there thinking, “Well, the cake last year was a little better,” or “The decorations were nicer when I turned five.” In the innocence of youth, she sees the future with hope and possibility, and the present with complete delight. She doesn’t reminisce about her last birthday; she looks forward with anticipation to her next one.
The older I get, the more I think that maybe my granddaughter has it right and the rest of us have it backwards. What if “the best day of my life” isn’t about the scale of the event, but the size of our appreciation?
A child can declare a trip to the park as the best day of their life because they are fully present for the swing, the slide, the ice cream afterward, and the feeling of their hand in yours. They aren’t distracted by the news, their email, or their to-do list. They live in that moment like it’s the only one they’ve got.
As adults, we carry worries about finances, health, family, and the state of the world. Those concerns are real, and I don’t want to pretend they aren’t. But I also know that when I sit at a table with family, when a grandchild climbs into my lap, when I get a phone call from an old friend, or when I wake up and realize I’ve been given one more day, those are contenders for “best day” status, if I choose to see them that way.
I’ve been blessed with some remarkable days, speaking to thousands of people, visiting city halls across the country, watching my children achieve their dreams, walking my granddaughter into school, and watching my wife’s smile across a crowded room. Those are mountaintop days, no doubt about it.
But there is something quietly powerful about an average day done well: a simple breakfast, a good cup of coffee, a friendly conversation at the grocery store, a sunny drive through the country, or a kind word to someone who needed it. If we stack enough of those days together, we may look back and realize the best part of our life wasn’t the highlight reel at all—it was the steady, ordinary goodness that we were living right through.
So, the next time someone asks, “How’s your day going?” we might borrow a line from a six-year-old Sadie, who has life figured out better than most of us.
“This is the best day of my life.”
And if we say it often enough, we just might start to believe it.
