This I Believe

The Power to Change a Day

Fridays. Some people dread them; others look forward to them. (I know I do.) All too often, someone pronounces their Friday a terrible day. Not often enough, someone else declares their Friday a good day.

The majority of both these people believe they have no control over making their Fridays, or any other day, a good day. I believe we do have the power of making any day a good one.

I think it’s about the mindset. When I wake up in the morning and decide to make today as good as it can be, whether it wants to be or not, I have to keep a certain mindset until it’s over. I make sure the day has something good I’m pretty certain is going to happen. This could be that I get to play my favorite game in P.E. or that my bus is guaranteed to be on time. Whatever it is, I know it’s something I don’t get to do everyday. I believe this ensures that this day is at least better than the other days when P.E. did suck or my bus was late. Sometimes, in the long run, that’s all that matters.

Along with that mindset, I believe it’s about stringing together the little things and just not thinking about the bad stuff. On my favorite-game-in-P.E.-bus-actually-on-time-Friday, the bad stuff might be that I get a ton of algebra homework, I got a bad grade on a big paper, and maybe one of my friends got mad at me. So I try not to think about those things and, instead, string together the little good things. Other than the bus and P.E. this might be that I played my solo in band perfectly, and someone else gave me a tootsie roll pop, and I identified a mineral correctly in Science for the first time, and maybe I laughed more than usual today. I believe making that stuff count for more than the bad really does add up and makes a difference.

Some days are just destined to go against you or be entirely ruled by Murphy’s Law (what can go wrong will and at the worst possible time). If we try to make one of these days a good day, the outcome isn’t as pleasant. However, I believe we should still come out of it smiling. A day that would have been horribly, terribly, awful became “just okay” because we forced it to be better. I think making a bad day “just okay” is a win even though it’s not as nice as making an okay day great. I fully believe we have the power to change a day, even if we don’t know it. All we have to do is try.