Life is something to be enthusiastic about. It deserves to be grabbed with both hands and taken full advantage of.
What a waste if we were to simply allow life to fly by before our eyes without truly attempting to get what we can out of it. And I'm talking about every little bit of it. The early mornings, your recent work project, a night out with friends. Grab everything with both hands and approach it all with as much enthusiasm as you can possibly muster before a decent breakfast?
I've been terribly guilty of not doing as such; waking up with a half-arsed attitude towards the day, getting work done simply to say that it's done and wasting the minutes and hours away for no reason other than pure laziness.
Recently I was slapped around the face with a big, fat reality check. Why wake up each morning with the attitude that I had previously been greeting the day with when I can make use of each 24 hours? I could enjoy my breakfast rather than hurrying it. I could make the effort to start a cheerful conversation with everybody I come by. I could throw myself into work projects rather than perceive them as a chore and revel in the sense of achievement that comes with actually doing the best job I could have done.
Enough is enough, said the slap of reality. No more letting life slip through my fingers when I should be grasping it with both hands. As Mr Ralph Waldo Emerson told us, "We are always getting ready to live, but never living". And I want to live!
Too often we wait. We wait for a perfect job, for the ideal man, for a solution to our troubles rather than working them out ourselves. We live under the illusion that shit happens and that good things will come about for us if they are supposed to. Bollocks to that theory.
You get what you give and you get what you work for. If we want to, we can take something from even the crappiest and most mundane of days. We can make our daily commute to work our morning adventure, fueled by a delicious coffee treat and a muffin that you won't deny yourself because you deserve it.
We can give 100% to work projects that we dread taking part in. We can take a walk to somewhere we've never been and call someone we haven't spoken to in a long while. We can decide to have a fun evening whether we're out with our friends or at home with only a fictional but strangely fanciable man from the pages of a book to keep us company.
We can simply have a good day almost every day, if we're willing to let ourselves grab life with both hands.You needn't be jet-setting off to various exotic locations every few weeks and splashing your cash like it grows on trees to live an exciting life.
It's your choice to make the most of each day. Even Mondays.
Life is hard sometimes, there is no denying. It's how you emphasise the good times and make the hard times better. When you're 80, you'll only regret the days that you wasted.
Image via That One Dood's Flickr